“There was far too much interest in the past, she thought. People were forever digging up events that had taken place a long time ago. And what was the point in doing this if the effect was merely to poison the present?”

“There were times when an apology was best, she thought, even when one really had nothing to apologise for. If only people would say sorry sooner rather than later, Mma Ramotswe believed, much discord and unhappiness could be avoided. But that was not the way people were. So often pride stood in the way of apology, and then, when somebody was ready to say sorry, it was already too late.”

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

“Sometimes she thought that the people overseas had no room in their heart for Africa, because nobody had ever told them that African people were just the same as they were”

“As a girl she had imagined the Milky Way was the curtain of heaven, a notion she had been sorry to abandon as she had grown up. But she would not abandon a belief in heaven itself, wherever that may be, because she felt that if she gave that up then there would be very little left. Heaven may not turn out to be the place of her imagining, she conceded--the place envisaged in the old Botswana stories, a place inhabited by gentle white cattle, with sweet breath--but it would surely be something not too unlike that, at least in the way it felt; a place where late people would be give all that they had lacked on this earth--a place of love for those who had not been loved, a place where those who had had nothing would find they had everything the human heart could desire.”

“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.”

“If the lord came back today, [Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni] thought, he would probably be a mechanic, he reflected. That would be a great honour for mechanics everywhere. And there is no doubt but that e would choose Africa: Israel was far too dangerous these days. In fact, the more one thought about it, the more likely it was that he would choose Botswana, and Gabarone in particular. Now that would be a wonderful honour for the people of Botswana; but it would not happen, and there was no point in thinking about it any further. The Lord was not going to come back; we had had our chance and we had not made very much of it, unfortunately.”