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The Quiet Side of Passion (Isabel Dalhousie #12) QUOTES

The Quiet Side of Passion (Isabel Dalhousie #12) QUOTES

1 " It had made her think of the moral flavour of music. Could music really have a moral quality in itself, or was it given this by the circumstances in which it was played - and by the reasons behind its performance. Music could be pressed into military service: a triumphal march would be good if played by the right side, and wrong if played by those in the wrong. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Quiet Side of Passion (Isabel Dalhousie #12)

2 " Love and compassion are the only balm "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Quiet Side of Passion (Isabel Dalhousie #12)

3 " It was a warm evening, at least by the standards applied in Scotland, where summer is sometimes no more than a promise, an aspiration "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Quiet Side of Passion (Isabel Dalhousie #12)

4 " Eddie let out a whistle. “You really got rid of that old bag.” “Please don’t call her that.” “But that’s what she is,” said Eddie. “She complained to me about the Parmesan the other day. She more or less accused me of substituting grana. She’s a real pain. Big-time. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Quiet Side of Passion (Isabel Dalhousie #12)

5 " Giving gave every bit as much pleasure as receiving—if not more, and denying that pleasure to others could be churlish. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Quiet Side of Passion (Isabel Dalhousie #12)

6 " If you lived in a house your parents lived in, then you would not have had to buy it. But the house itself represented inherited wealth, and in some eyes, that was somehow tainted. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Quiet Side of Passion (Isabel Dalhousie #12)

7 " We think that we can fix our lives by taking some simple step, but it's not like that. Most problems need lots of sticking plasters. They need coaxing and massaging and looking at from all sorts of different angles. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Quiet Side of Passion (Isabel Dalhousie #12)

8 " We enmesh the people we love in a nest of golden wires. Or bind them to us. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Quiet Side of Passion (Isabel Dalhousie #12)

9 " she realised that he was probably right. Time was running out in so many respects—for our tenancy of a world that we were despoiling at an unsustainable rate as well as for the survival of our species in the face of nuclear proliferation. Obviously, this was evident from Hogget Road, Auchtermuchty, but not necessarily appreciated in the centres of world power. How frustrating it must be, she thought, for Mr. Archibald P. Raeburn to know this and yet to be powerless to do much about it. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Quiet Side of Passion (Isabel Dalhousie #12)

10 " Love and compassion are the only balm. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Quiet Side of Passion (Isabel Dalhousie #12)

11 " Cover hatred and fear with love and delight, and with innocent things...The proponents of confrontation, violence, the acerbic comment, laughed at the innocent things, thought them naive, considered them beneath them. How easy it was to destroy the civilised structures of the world; how easy to poison the wells. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Quiet Side of Passion (Isabel Dalhousie #12)

12 " Someone who lived at Square One would be one who knew that much of our achievement is temporary, if not even illusory, and that ultimately we return to the place we started from, if not geographically, then at least metaphorically. We were born with nothing, and left this life with nothing, whatever glories and conceits we created for ourselves. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Quiet Side of Passion (Isabel Dalhousie #12)

13 " You’ll grow up. People did not like to be told that, she thought, because we all think that what we are now is what we shall be tomorrow. That was clearly false—but we all believed it. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Quiet Side of Passion (Isabel Dalhousie #12)

14 " Love and loss—two things that went together, it seemed, with a poignant inevitability; we loved, knowing that we would lose, but loved nonetheless because...She stopped. Yes, because we did not choose to love; we loved because we had to. Love was something that happened to us; it was never planned, even if we knew that some day, at some moment, it might alight upon us and—we hoped—change everything. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Quiet Side of Passion (Isabel Dalhousie #12)

15 " Cover hatred and fear with love and delight, and with innocent things. With love and delight, and with innocent things. The trouble was that people were cynical about innocent things, or too embarrassed to celebrate them. The proponents of confrontation, violence, the acerbic comment, laughed at innocent things, thought them naïve, considered them beneath them. How easy it was to destroy the civilised structures of the world; how easy to poison the wells. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Quiet Side of Passion (Isabel Dalhousie #12)