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The Right Attitude to Rain (Isabel Dalhousie, #3) QUOTES

The Right Attitude to Rain (Isabel Dalhousie, #3) QUOTES

1 " We act out our lives to a soundtrack, thought Isabel, the music that becomes, for a spell, out favourite and is listened to again and again until it stands for the time itself. But that was about all the scripting that we achieved; the rest, for most of us, was extemporising. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Right Attitude to Rain (Isabel Dalhousie, #3)

2 " We chose younger and younger politicians to lead us because they looked good on television and were sharp. But really we should be looking for wisdom, and choosing people who had acquired it; and such people, in general, looked bad on television - gray, lined, thoughtful. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Right Attitude to Rain (Isabel Dalhousie, #3)

3 " Out in Saxe-Coburg Street she stood still for a moment and looked at the gardens. He kissed me, she thought. He made the move; I didn't. The thought was an overwhelming one and invested the everyday world about her, the world of the square, of trees, of people walking by, with a curious glow, a chiaroscuro which made everything precious. It was the feeling, she imagined, that one had when one vouchsafed a vision. Everything is changed, becomes more blessed, making the humblest of surroundings a holy place. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Right Attitude to Rain (Isabel Dalhousie, #3)

4 " If your ceiling should fall down, then you have lost a room, but gained a courtyard. Think of it that way. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Right Attitude to Rain (Isabel Dalhousie, #3)

5 " How many of us are happy to be exactly where we are at any moment?...only the completely happy think that they are in the correct place. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Right Attitude to Rain (Isabel Dalhousie, #3)

6 " The point about love, the essential point, was that we loved what we loved. We did not choose. We just loved. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Right Attitude to Rain (Isabel Dalhousie, #3)

7 " There was nothing more unattractive than narcissism, she thought: nothing could transform beauty into a cloying, unattractive quality than that self-conscious appreciation of self. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Right Attitude to Rain (Isabel Dalhousie, #3)

8 " That, said Isabel, is the most painful feature of lost love. you wonder what the other person is doing. Right at this moment. What is he/she doing? "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Right Attitude to Rain (Isabel Dalhousie, #3)

9 " When you are with somebody you love the smallest, smallest things can be so important, so amusing because love transforms the world, everything. And was that what had happened? "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Right Attitude to Rain (Isabel Dalhousie, #3)

10 " Protestations of happiness could sound almost boasting to those whose happiness is incomplete. One did not boast of perfect skin to one affected by dermatitis; for the same reason, perhaps, one should take care in proclaiming one's happiness. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Right Attitude to Rain (Isabel Dalhousie, #3)

11 " We never realise how transparent we are. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Right Attitude to Rain (Isabel Dalhousie, #3)

12 " In bed that night, in the darkness, with the illuminated dial of her alarm clock glowing from the bedside table, she asked herself whether one could force oneself to like somebody, or whether one could merely create conditions for affection to come into existence and hope that it did, spontaneously. Open then our hearts - these words came into her mind, dredged from somewhere in her memory, from some unknown context. If one opened one's heart, then friendship, and love, too, might alight and make their presence known. It was the act of opening that came first; that was the important thing, the first thing. But who was it who said, Open then our hearts? Where did that come from? "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Right Attitude to Rain (Isabel Dalhousie, #3)

13 " She had been tied to an incubus, the memory of a love that had been rejected and had had nowhere to go; she had been locked into a dead relationship and now the last dried skin of it had fallen away, like the scab on a wound, and she was free. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Right Attitude to Rain (Isabel Dalhousie, #3)

14 " It was easy to be moral when that was the way you felt anyway. The hard bit about morality was making yourself feel the opposite of what you really felt. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Right Attitude to Rain (Isabel Dalhousie, #3)

15 " She felt that she had revealed something to Cat, and with revealing something about oneself there always comes a sense of lightening of the load that we all carry; the load of being ourselves. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Right Attitude to Rain (Isabel Dalhousie, #3)

16 " It's a different sort of love taht puts up with illness. Old love. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Right Attitude to Rain (Isabel Dalhousie, #3)

17 " ...because love can come, if you believe in it and behave as if it exists. That was the case, too, with free will; with perhaps, fath of any sort; and love was a sort of faith, was it not? "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Right Attitude to Rain (Isabel Dalhousie, #3)

18 " For each of us, she thought, there is out completeness in another. Whether we find it, or it finds us, or it eludes all finding is a matter of moral luck. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Right Attitude to Rain (Isabel Dalhousie, #3)

19 " Which is how most people acted when it came to temptation. They gave in. And we should never forget, thought Isabel, that every one of us is capable of doing the same thing if the game that we see for ourselves is large enough. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Right Attitude to Rain (Isabel Dalhousie, #3)

20 " The rules of the jungle did not apply to those who wrote the rules of the jungle. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Right Attitude to Rain (Isabel Dalhousie, #3)