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Love Over Scotland (44 Scotland Street, #3) QUOTES

Love Over Scotland (44 Scotland Street, #3) QUOTES

1 " Regular maps have few surprises: their contour lines reveal where the Andes are, and are reasonably clear. More precious, though, are the unpublished maps we make ourselves, of our city, our place, our daily world, our life; those maps of our private world we use every day; here I was happy, in that place I left my coat behind after a party, that is where I met my love; I cried there once, I was heartsore; but felt better round the corner once I saw the hills of Fife across the Forth, things of that sort, our personal memories, that make the private tapestry of our lives. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , Love Over Scotland (44 Scotland Street, #3)

2 " Matthew knew that phrenology was nonsense, and yet, years later, he found himself making judgments similar to those made by his father; slippery people looked slippery; they really did. And how we become like our parents! How their scorned advice - based, we felt in our superiority, on prejudiced and muddled folk wisdom - how their opinions are subsequently borne out by our own discoveries and sense of the world, one after one. And as this happens, we realise with increasing horror that proposition which we would never have entertained before: our mothers were right! "

― Alexander McCall Smith , Love Over Scotland (44 Scotland Street, #3)

3 " Gracious acceptance is an art - an art which most never bother to cultivate. We think that we have to learn how to give, but we forget about accepting things, which can be much harder than giving.... Accepting another person's gift is allowing him to express his feelings for you. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , Love Over Scotland (44 Scotland Street, #3)

4 " International business, once allowed to stalk uncontrolled, killed the local, the small, the quirky. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , Love Over Scotland (44 Scotland Street, #3)

5 " Antonia was very conscious of the corrosive power of envy and felt that it was this emotion, more than any other, which lay behind human unhappiness. People did not realise how widespread envy was. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , Love Over Scotland (44 Scotland Street, #3)

6 " It was a pointed sigh, as sighs sometimes are, not one cast into the air to evaporate, but one calculated to descend, precisely and with great effect, on a target. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , Love Over Scotland (44 Scotland Street, #3)

7 " What a strange,old-fashioned thing to think. Bless you. But what other way was there of saying that you wanted only good for somebody, that you wanted the world to be kind to her, to cherish her?Only old-fashioned words would do for that. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , Love Over Scotland (44 Scotland Street, #3)

8 " Plenty of people were writing novels; in fact, if one did a survey in the street, half of Edinburgh was writing a novel, and this meant that there really weren't enough characters to go round. Unless, of course, one wrote about people who were themselves writing novels. And what would the novels that these fictional characters were writing be about? Well, they would be novels about people writing novels. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , Love Over Scotland (44 Scotland Street, #3)

9 " The Morning After Coffee Bar was different from the mass-produced coffee bars that had mushroomed on every street almost everywhere, a development which presaged the flattening effects of globalisation; the spreading, under a cheerful banner, of a sameness that threatened to weaken and destroy all sense of place. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , Love Over Scotland (44 Scotland Street, #3)

10 " Anthropology, she thought, like charity, surely begins at home. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , Love Over Scotland (44 Scotland Street, #3)

11 " Will you be my friend?” Bertie asked. And then added: “Just for Paris. You don’t have to be my friend forever – just for Paris. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , Love Over Scotland (44 Scotland Street, #3)

12 " Writers just play out their fantasies in their books. They are often very unstable, tricky people, Bertie. Writers are usually very bad at real life and feel that they have to create imaginary lives to make up for it. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , Love Over Scotland (44 Scotland Street, #3)

13 " No matter what precautions were taken, socks disappeared into a Bermuda Triangle for socks, a swirling vortex that swallowed one sock at a time, leaving its partner stranded. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , Love Over Scotland (44 Scotland Street, #3)

14 " unconscionable–eating the food in a supermarket was simply theft, and could be distinguished from shoplifting only by virtue of the nature of the container used to remove the property. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , Love Over Scotland (44 Scotland Street, #3)

15 " Most children have become very surly. That is because they are not taught to think about others any more. They are, quite simply, spoiled. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , Love Over Scotland (44 Scotland Street, #3)

16 " Nobody went to bed at seven in Paris, even French children. Les enfants stayed up late at night, he had heard, eating with the adults, sipping red wine, and discussing the latest books and films. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , Love Over Scotland (44 Scotland Street, #3)

17 " Bertie stared at his mother. She spoils things, he thought. All she ever does is spoil things.

He had not started this conversation, and it was not his fault that they were now talking about Grey Owl. He sounded rather a nice man to Bertie. Any why should he not dress up in feathers and live in the forests if that was what he wanted to do? It was typical of his mother to try to spoil Grey Owl's fun. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , Love Over Scotland (44 Scotland Street, #3)

18 " that we must love one another, whatever our condition in life, canine or otherwise, and that this love is a matter of joy, a privilege, that we might think about, weep over, when the moment is right. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , Love Over Scotland (44 Scotland Street, #3)

19 " I’m sure that Pat likes you,” said Big Lou. “And perhaps she would like you even more if she knew how you felt about her. Have you ever told her that?” “Of course not,” said Matthew. Big Lou should have known better than to ask that question. This was Edinburgh, after all. One did not go about the place declaring oneself like some lovesick Californian. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , Love Over Scotland (44 Scotland Street, #3)