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What could you do? Major Major asked himself again. What could you do with a man who looked you squarely in the eye and said he would rather die than be killed in combat

Keep in mind that when we talk of a great painting we are not really talking about anything great. We are talking of only a painting.

We all had to pay, but not for the crimes we were accused of. There were other scores to settle.

Why are they going to disappear him? I don't know. It doesn't make sense. It isn't even good grammar. What the hell does it mean when they disappear somebody?

Read me back the last line. 'Read me back the last line,' read back the corporal who could take shorthand. Not my last line, stupid! the colonel shouted. Somebody else's. 'Read me back the last line,'...

The Red Lion was a four-ale bar with a handful of lowbrowed sons of toil who looked as though they might be related to one another in ways frowned on by the Old Testament.

if you don't understand something, you can't approximate it. You're really just guessing.

Hope for some means its loss for others; when the hopeless regain some hope, those in power--the ones who had taken it away--become afraid, more protective of their endangered interests, more...

If I turned towards books, it was because they were the only sanctuary I knew, one I needed in order to survive, to protect some aspect of myself that was now in constant retreat.

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.

So it was perfectly possible that there were men who liked shopping, men who understood exactly what it was all about, but Mma Ramotwe had yet to meet such a man. Maybe they existed elsewhere - in...

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.

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

None of us knows how we will cope with snakes until the moment arises, and then most of us find out that we do not do it very well. Snakes were one of the tests which life sent for us, and there was...

Well, said Mma Ramotswe, I have felt that anger. I felt it when I saw that the van had gone. I felt it a bit in the truck on the way back. But what is the point of anger now, Mma? I don't think that...

The ordinary you, the you that has to go to work every morning, the you that has to run a household, pay bills, do all of those things--that you is somehow changed into an exciting, artistic, fully...

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

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

We need a person whom we can make our little god on this earth, as the old Kgatla saying had it. Whether it was a spouse, or a child, or a parent, or anybody else for that matter, there must be...

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

It was just too easy to say that adults did not like stories that were simple, and perhaps that was wrong. Perhaps that was what adults really wanted, searched for and rarely found: a simple story in...

Mr. J.L.B Matekoni, she asked, do you think that our souls grow as we get older?He did not answer immediately, but when he did, she thought his answer quite perfect. Yes, he said. Our souls get wider....

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...

There were few other passengers: a man in an overcoat, his head sunk against his chest; a couple with arms around each other, impervious to their surroundings; and a teenage boy with a black scarf...

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.

There are so many ways of falling off the high moral ground you've carefully built up for yourself. Moral ground is like that-slippery at the edges.

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

We needed resentment, he said, as it was resentment which identified and underlined the wrong. Without these reactive attitudes, we ran the risk of diminishing our sense of right and wrong, because we...

Resolution. Musicians know all about that, don't they? Pieces of music seek resolution, have to end on a particular note, or it sounds all wrong. The same applies to our lives. It's exactly the same.

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...

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

...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...

It was easy to make a difference to other people's lives, so easy to change the little room in which people lived their life.