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The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds (Isabel Dalhousie, #9) QUOTES

The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds (Isabel Dalhousie, #9) QUOTES

1 " ... 'You can't read everything. I've never got beyond the beginning of Proust. I love him, but I can't seem to get beyond about page three.'

They were comfortable in each other's company, and this confession seemed to accentuate the ease of their relationship. The confession itself was not entirely true; Isabel had read more Proust than that, but other people undoubtedly found it reassuring to think that one had only read a few pages. Certainly those who claimed to have read Proust in his entirety got scant sympathy from others. And yet, she suddenly wondered, should you actually lie about how much Proust you've read? Some politicians, she reminded herself, did that--or the equivalent--when they claimed to be down-to-earth, no-nonsense types, just like the voters, when all the time they were secretly delighting in Proust . . . "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds (Isabel Dalhousie, #9)

2 " Those important brain circuits, the ones that enabled most of us to avoid saying the wrong thing, were simply not there in Martha's case; or fired in the wrong order; or were short-circuiting. In other words, Martha Drummond was an electrical problem. And understanding people as electrical problems undoubtedly helped one to tolerate them. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds (Isabel Dalhousie, #9)

3 " She imagined what it must be like to have Charlie's mind - to believe that red shoes are faster then other shoes; to believe, as he did, that ducks could drive fire engines and that pigs built houses out of bricks and straw. There were plenty of people who weren't three-and-three-quarters who believed equally implausible things...and when to war over them. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds (Isabel Dalhousie, #9)

4 " good things that we have in life are on temporary loan, at best, and can be taken away from us in an instant. The borderline between good fortune and disaster, between plenitude and paucity, between the warm hearth of love and the cold chamber of loneliness, was a narrow one. We could cross over from one to the other at any moment, as when we stumbled or fell, or simply walked over to the other side because we were paying insufficient attention to where we were. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds (Isabel Dalhousie, #9)

5 " Even a battlefield can be peaceful, can be a place for flowers to grow, for children to play; the memories, the sadness, are within us, not part of the world about us. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds (Isabel Dalhousie, #9)

6 " Her eyes went to the shelves that stretched up to within a few inches of the ceiling. All four walls were covered; piles of books stood here and there, teetering, vulnerable, she judged, to the slightest footfall. “But who doesn’t have a lot of unread books? It’s nice, though, just to know that they’re there.” He "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds (Isabel Dalhousie, #9)

7 " Innocency: what a wonderful word, and different, in some indefinable way, from innocence. The difference, she thought, lay in the poetry. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds (Isabel Dalhousie, #9)

8 " Isabel smiled. She liked a conversation that went in odd directions; she liked the idea of playfulness in speech. People could be so depressingly literal. Jamie "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds (Isabel Dalhousie, #9)

9 " a word, as often happens, can be like a musical worm in the mind and invite repetition. But "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds (Isabel Dalhousie, #9)

10 " How do you calibrate pain?” asked Jamie. “By cutting out the background pain of the world,” answered Isabel. “By cutting all that out, not registering it, and responding only to those painful things that we can do something about. Because otherwise … "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds (Isabel Dalhousie, #9)

11 " And yet, she suddenly wondered, should you actually lie about how much Proust you've read? "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds (Isabel Dalhousie, #9)

12 " But only if youses shift yoursels and get in.” He used the demotic plural of you, a common feature of speech in Scotland. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds (Isabel Dalhousie, #9)

13 " So one might cry for everything that was wrong with the world, for all the injustice and crudity and cruelty, for all the things that are stolen from people. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds (Isabel Dalhousie, #9)

14 " The physical world—the world of stone and brick—is indifferent to our suffering, to our dramas, she thought. Even a battlefield can be peaceful, can be a place for flowers to grow, for children to play; the memories, the sadness, are within us, not part of the world about us. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds (Isabel Dalhousie, #9)

15 " It was pure privilege that determined where so many of us ended up in life, Isabel reflected; it was nothing to do with merit, it was privilege. Or, putting it another way, it was a matter of accident, or luck. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds (Isabel Dalhousie, #9)

16 " Martha simply did not know that virtually everything she said was inappropriate, and so there was no point in remonstrating with her. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds (Isabel Dalhousie, #9)

17 " As she spoke, Isabel found herself thinking of the power of words. A single word, a phrase, a sentence or two could have such extraordinary power; could end a world, break a heart or, as in this case, consign another to moral purdah. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds (Isabel Dalhousie, #9)

18 " That would have been taken out of the Munrowe voice two or three generations ago through being educated at schools that modelled themselves on the English public-school system, even if they were in Scotland. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds (Isabel Dalhousie, #9)

19 " But who doesn't have a lot of unread books? It's nice, though, to know they are there. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds (Isabel Dalhousie, #9)

20 " but to the north there was a bank of cirro-cumulus, a mackerel sky, or Schaefchenwolken—“sheep cloud”—as she remembered her father calling it. For some reason he had used German when talking about clouds and sea conditions; an odd habit that she had accepted as just being one of the things he did. “The weather,” he had once said to her, smiling, “is German. I don’t know why; it just is. Sorry. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds (Isabel Dalhousie, #9)