“Mma Ramotswe had listened to a World Service broadcast on her radio one day which had simply taken her breath away. It was about philosophers who called themselves existentialists and who, as far as Mma Ramotswe could ascertain, lived in France. These French people said that you should just live in a way which made you feel real, and that the real thing to do was the right thing too. Mma Ramotswe had listened in astonishment. You did not have to go to France to meet existentialists, she reflected; there were many existentialists right here in Botswana. Note Mokoti, for example. She had been married to an existentialist herself, without even knowing it. Note, that selfish man who never once put himself out for another--not even for his wife--would have approved of existentialists, and they of him. It was very existentialist, perhaps, to go out to bars every night while your pregnant wife stayed at home, and even more existentialist to go off with girls--young existentialist girls--you met in bars. It was a good life being an existentialist, although not too good for all the other, nonexistentialist people around one.”

“Holy Zarquon, did I ask for an existentialist elevator?”

“There are people, moreover, for whom even the absence of God is absent, who are shaken not by the privation of providence but by the privation of the privation, who live in a completely ungoverned and unconsoling world. To use the terms of another religious existentialist of Judaism against him: there is a man who is lonelier than the lonely man of faith, and he is the lonely man of no faith.”

“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...”

“Mma Ramotswe had a gift for the American woman, a basket which on her return journey from Bulawayo she had bought, on impulse, from a woman sitting by the side of the road in Francistown. The woman was desperate, and Mma Ramotswe, who did not need a basket, had bought it to help her. It was a traditional Botswana basket, with a design worked into the weaving."These little marks here are tears," she said. "The giraffe gives its tears to the women and they weave them into the basket."The American woman took the basket politely, in the proper Botswana way of receiving a gift with both hands. How rude were people who took a gift with one hand, as if snatching it from the donor; she knew better.You are very kind, Mma," she said. "But why did the giraffe give its tears?"Mma Ramotswe shrugged; she had never thought about it. "I suppose that it means that we can all give something," she said. "A giraffe has nothing else to give--only tears." Did it mean that? she wondered. And for a moment she imagined that she saw a giraffe peering down through the trees, its strange stilt-borne body among the leaves; and its moist velvet cheeks and liquid eyes; and she thought of all the beauty that there was in Africa, and of the laughter, and the love. The boy looked at the basket. "Is that true, Mma?"Mma Ramotswe smiled. "I hope so," she said.”

“Everything, all those great things, had happened so far away--or so it seemed to [Mma Ramotswe] at the time. The world was made to sound as if it belonged to other people--to those who lived in distant countries that were so different from Botswana; that was before people had learned to assert that the world was theirs too, that what happened in Botswana was every bit as important, and valuable, as what happened anywhere else.”