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Book: Trains and Lovers
Quotes of Book: Trains and Lovers

Alexander McCall Smith _ Trains and Lovers
{...} Look at the way people try to make points of contact with others when they meet. Look at the way you instinctively try to establish whether somebody you meet for the first time knows somebody you know. Watch people do it. I'm from such and such place. Oh yes? So you know So-and-So? Yes! And So-and-So? No, I don't know her, but of course, there's So-and-So. That's how it works.""I suppose so. But why?""Because we don't like impersonality. Maybe..."David joined in. "Because we had to." She asked him: "Had to what?""Because he had to co-operate. That's deep in the genes. We had to co-operate with one another and so we needed to know whether the stranger was a threat. {...}
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Alexander McCall Smith _ Trains and Lovers
Loving others, she thought, is the good thing we do in our lives.
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Alexander McCall Smith _ Trains and Lovers
Look at the way people try to make points of contact with others when they meet. Look at the way you instinctively try to establish whether somebody you meet for the first time knows somebody you know.
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Alexander McCall Smith _ Trains and Lovers
That's the way things are, don't you think? It's human nature. We do things for people we know. Everybody does that.
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Alexander McCall Smith _ Trains and Lovers
Already many of the memories of the previous two weeks had faded: the smell of that small hotel in St. Andrews; that mixture of bacon cooking for breakfast and the lavender-scented soap in the bathroom; the air from the sea drifting across the golf course; the aroma of coffee in the coffee bar in South Street. She should have noted them down. She should have said something about all that and the light and the hills with sheep on them like small white stones.
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Alexander McCall Smith _ Trains and Lovers
And then there is the poet Kenneth Koch, who while travelling in Kenya came to a railroad crossing at which this sign was posted: One train may hide another. This was meant, of course, as a warning to drivers of the fact that the train you see may not be the only train to reckon with, but it also meant, as Koch points out in his poem, that there are many things in this life that conceal other things. One letter may mean another is on the way; one hitch-hiker may deliberately hide another one by the side of the road; offer to carry one bag and you may find there is another one hidden behind it, with the result that you must carry two. And so on through life. Do not count on things coming in ones.
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Alexander McCall Smith _ Trains and Lovers
It's easy to be foolish... It's dead simple, really. All you have to be is human and to allow yourself to do the human things, like fall in love with somebody when you know that there's no point and when you know, too, that it's just going to make you unhappy. It's better to be stoic - to be one of those people who manage to keep themselves to themselves, who manage to avoid letting go and becoming entangled in something that they know from experience is going to cause unhappiness. Or is it? There were people who chose that, and seemed to do it successfully, but weren't they filled with regret? Inside, where nobody could see, didn't it hurt them to think about what they never had?
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Alexander McCall Smith _ Trains and Lovers
You can't deceive your own mother. That's the one person, the only one, to whom you will always be transparent.
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Alexander McCall Smith _ Trains and Lovers
You might imagine that the magic stopped at the airport, and to a great extent it did. When we arrived back in London, the skies were overcast and heavy. The bus driver from the airport was morose and unkempt; the streets seemed run-down and dirty, the people sour-faced. But that, I suspect, is how coming home is for everyone; Parisians probably felt the same when they returned from somewhere else.
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Alexander McCall Smith _ Trains and Lovers
It was safer, he thought, to keep it to himself; because there are many ways of loving.
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Alexander McCall Smith _ Trains and Lovers
We change the earth and our changes may only be temporary; yet the signs of what we have done may persist, as these mounds did.
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Alexander McCall Smith _ Trains and Lovers
...thinking about somebody every day of his life... oh yes, he said to himself. Oh yes, you do. You think about somebody. He fills your world. He is all about you, a presence, and you think about him; you can't help it, because he's always there, in your thoughts. But you know, of course, that all the while you're thinking about him, he's not thinking about you. That's the hardest thing about it. That's what makes it so very, very hard to bear. So hard that sometimes you just sit there and let the misery wash over you; the misery, the emptiness.
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