“He seemed genuinely astonished. "You admire me?""Yes," she said gravely. "All of us do things we regret--that's part of being human. And sometimes, I think, moral quality reveals itself not so much in what we do, but in what we later say about what we have done....”

“Look at those clouds," said Jamie, gazing up at the sky. "Look at them." "Yes," said Isabel. "They're very beautiful, aren't they? Clouds are very beautiful and yet so often we fail to appreciate them properly. We should do that. We should look at them and think about how lucky we are to have them." "Look at the shape of the clouds," she said. "What do you see in those beautiful clouds, Jamie?""I see you," he said.”

“We were the Bechuanaland Protectorate then, and the British ran our country, to protect us from the Boers (or that is what they said). There was a Commissioner down in Mafikeng, over the border into South Africa, and he would come up the road and speak to the chiefs. He would say: "You do this thing; you do that thing." And the chiefs all obeyed him because they knew that if they did not he would have them deposed. But some of them were clever, and while the British said "You do this," they would say "Yes, yes, sir, I will do that" and all the time, behind their backs, they did the other thing or they just pretended to do something. So for many years, nothing at all happened. It was a good system of government, because most people want nothing to happen. That is the problem with governments these days. They want to do things all the time; they are always very busy thinking of what things they can do next. That is not what people want. People want to be left alone to look after their cattle.”

“Artists were allowed to do that - to look, to gaze at others and try to find out what it was that they were feeling - but we, who were not artists, were not. If one looked too hard that would be considered voyeurism, or nosienss, which is what Cat, her neice, had accused her of more than once. Jamie - the boyfriend rejected by Cat but kept on by Isabel as a friend - had done the same althought more tactfully. He had said that she needed to draw a line in the world with me written on one side and you on the other. Me would be her business; you would be the business of others, and an invitation would be required to cross the line.She had said to Jamie: "Not a good idea, Jamie. What if people on the other side of the line are in trouble?"That's different," he said. "You help them."By streching a hand across this line of yours?"Of course. Helping people is different."She had said: "But then we have to know what they need, don't we? We have to be aware of others. If we went about concerned with only our own little world, how would we know when there was trouble brewing on the other side of the line?”

“But we all waste opportunities,’ said Domenica. Every single one of us. Every young person does it. It’s because we think we have so much time, and then, when we realise that our time is finite, it’s too late.”

“You cannot divide a child's heart in two" she had observed to Mma Makutsi, "and yet that is what some people wish to do. A child has only one heart.""And the rest of us?" Mma Makutsi had asked. "Do we not have one heart too?"Mma Ramotswe nodded. "Yes, we have only one heart, but as you grow older you heart grows bigger. A child loves only one or two things; we love so many things.""Such as?"Mma Ramotswe smiled. "Botswana. Rain. Cattle. Friends. Our children. Our late relatives. The smell of woodsmoke in the morning. Red bush tea...”

“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.”