"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."

"I told him that if a man is born in a dry place, then although he may dream of rain, he does not want too much, and that he will not mind the sun that beats down and down."

"It just did not make sense; unless, of course, as she had suggested, we all have a weak point, an area of intellectual or emotional vulnerability that may be quite out of keeping with out character."

"If we treated others with the consideration that one would give to those who only had a few days to live, then we would be kinder, at least."

"Brother Fox looked in. He saw two people. He saw them raise their glasses of wine to him, liquid that for him was suspended in the air, as if by a miracle."

"...is under active consideration."

"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."

"Talking about pumpkins doesn't make them grow."

"I think that the measure of whether a life has been a good one is how much love there has been in that life--love both given and received."

"Everything is possible in love. In the heart of each of us there can be many rooms, and sometimes there are."

"Distant wrongs, she thought: an interesting issue in moral philosophy. Do past wrongs seem less wrong to us simply because they are less vivid?"

"You simply could not help everybody; but you could at least help those who came into your life."

"The new lover, of a few weeks standing, may seem more precious than friends of decades."

"You cannot make somebody love something. They must have love in their heart first."

"That's the curious thing about love, isn't it? It makes very ordinary things seem special. It makes them seem so much more valuable than they really are."

"...has it ever occurred to people that love at first sight might be the rule rather than the exception? How many people fall in love gradually rather than on the first occasion they meet the other person?"

"Perhaps if you don't know there's a gap, you don't worry about it. If you were a millipede, a tshongololo, crawling along the ground would you look at the birds and worry about not having wings? Probably not."

"She had been seized with a sudden existential horror. The house had white carpets and white furniture and, most significantly, no books."

"Men can be teenagers until well into their twenties. That is well known"

"Well, that's the important thing, isn't it, Mma? To feel happiness, and then to remember it."

"Lightning always strikes in the same place twice," said Mma Ramotswe. "Whatever people say to the contrary."

"It is my duty to help them solve the mysteries in their lives. That is what I am called to do."

"The young rarely believe that they will not be able to get what they want, because there is always an open future."

"She had noticed that there was a tendency on the part of some Americans to believe that everybody, deep inside, wanted to live in America, and that it was inexplicable that people who could do so did not."

"You say that you lost your child. You know how I feel then. You know that, don't you? It's a sadness that never goes away."

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

"...it must be odd to have no ambition, not to want something more."

"Myth is a cloud based upon a shadow based upon the movement of the breeze."

"I'd like to be tidy, said Hen, I try, but I guess you can't be what you aren't."

"None of us is immune to shipwreck. Come, beckons the fatal shore: come and die on my white sands, it said. And we do."

"She remembered love, though, and a feeling of warmth. It was like remembering light, or the glow that sometimes persists after a light has gone out."

"Mma Ramotswe did not like lying, but sometimes it was necessary, particularly when faced with people who were promoted beyond their talents."

"Moisturiser and a good cry: two things for modern men to think about."

"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."

"The problem with being me, thought Isabel, as she walked along George IV Bridge, is that I keep thinking about the problem of being me."

"Women, as usual, were expected to behave better than men, and inevitably attracted criticism for doing things that men were licensed to do with impunity."

"It was time for tea as it so often was."

"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."

"There's a difference, I think, between falling in love and knowing it."

"How many of us are happy to be exactly where we are at any moment?"