"It is sometimes easier to be happy if you don't know everything."

"She was made for untidy rooms and rumpled beds."

"We all know that it is women who make the decisions, but we have to let men think that the decisions are theirs. It is an act of kindness on the part of women."

"The telling of a story, like virtually everything in this life, was always made all the easier by a cup of tea."

"That of all people, it should be him; that took her aback. That the heart should settle on somebody like him; that surprised her. But she was so certain about it, so certain."

"Be content with who you are and where you are, and do whatever you can do to bring to others such contentment, and joy, and understanding that you have managed to find yourself."

"Do not act meanly, do not be unkind, because the time for setting things right may pass before your heart changes course. Isabel Dalhousie"

"A life without stories would be no life at all. And stories bound us, did they not, one to another, the living to the dead, people to animals, people to the land?"

"But don't we often lie to people we love, or not tell them things, precisely because we love them?"

"Every man has a map in his heart of his own country and that the heart will never allow you to forget this map. (p. 18)"

"...great things may come from moments of nothingness."

"There are many women whose lives would be immeasurably improved by widowhood, but one should not always point that out."

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

"There is room in history for all of us."

"There is plenty of work for love to do."

"I am just a tiny person in Africa, but there is a place for me, and for everybody, to sit down on this earth and touch it and call it their own."

"Traditional Botswana men like ladies who are more traditionally shaped. You and I, Mma. We remind men of how things used to be in Botswana before these modern-shaped ladies started to get men all confused."

"The previously unloved may find it hard to believe that they are now loved; that is such a miracle, they feel; such a miracle."

"Special things have a way of surviving."

"You are a lucky lady to be marrying a man who can fix things. Most husbands just break things."

"Women are the ones who knows what's going on,' she said quietly . 'They are the ones with eyes. Have you not heard of Agatha Christie?"

"People stuck by others for years and years, in the face of all odds, and it should be relief, not disbelief, that one felt on witnessing it."

"She's sociopathic. She will have no moral compunction in doing whatever is in her interests. It's as simple as that."

"We shall change all that...because it is possible to change the world, if one is determined enough, and if one sees with sufficient clarity just what has to be changed."

"Sometimes she thought that the people overseas had no room in their heart for Africa, because nobody had ever told them that African people were just the same as they were"

"If you take God out of it, then right and justice become small, human things. And weak things too."

"Everybody knows, she thought, that we have a skeleton underneath our skin; there's no reason to show it"

"Boys, men," she said. "They're all the same. They think that this [their manhood] is something special and they're all so proud of it. They do not know how ridiculous it is."

"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."

"The danger, of course, is that we spend time imagining that we would be happier elsewhere, and forget to cultivate happiness where fate has placed us."

"...the thought crossed her mind that a bed was really a very strange thing-a human nest, really, where our human fragility made its nightly demands for comfort and cosseting"

"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."

"Isabel saw the intimacy of the gestures and felt immediately empty, a sensation so physical and so overwhelming that she felt for a moment that she might stop breathing, being empty of air"

"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?"

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

"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?"

"There was no need for words, for there are times when words can only hint at what the heart would wish to say."

"No plaque reminds the passer-by of these glories, although there should be one; for those who invent biscuits bring great pleasure to many."

"Myth could be as sustaining as reality - sometimes even more so."

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

"There was so much suffering in Africa that it was tempting just to shrug your shoulders and walk away. But you can't do that, she thought. You just can't."

"But he'll never be fully recognised, because Scots literature these days is all about complaining and moaning and being injured in one's soul."

"There were two classes of persons upon whom a duty of virtually absolute confidentiality rested: doctors and lovers."

"...pleasure at hearing what all of us wanted to hear at least occasionally: that there was somebody who liked us, whatever our faults, and liked us sufficiently to say so. "

"Tea, for me, is one of the great subjects. It is a romatic trade, it does not pollute excessively, it has all sorts of health benefits, it calms and wakes you up at the same time."

"...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?"

"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."

"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."

"We never realise how transparent we are."

"How remarkable it was, she thought, that we managed to anchor ourselves at all in this world, and that we did so by giving ourselves names and linking those names with places and other people."