“Why is it that there are always these problems and misunderstandings between men and women? Surely it would have been better if God had made only one sort of person, and the children had come by some other means, with the rain perhaps.”

“The difficulty, of course, with standing up to women was that it appeared to make little difference. At the end of the day,a man was no match for a woman.... The only thing to do was to try to avoid situations where women might corner you. And that was difficult, because women had a way of ensuring that you were neatly boxed in, which was exactly what had happened to him. He should have been more careful. He should have been on his guard when she offered him cake. That was her technique, he now understood; just as Eve had used an apple to trap Adam, so [she] had used fruit cake. Fruit cake, apples; it made no difference really. Oh foolish, weak men!”

“Teachers were not allowed to beat children as they did in the past, although, Mma Ramotswe reflected, there were some boys-and indeed some young men-who might have been greatly improved by moderate physical correction. The apprentices, for example: would it help if Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni resorted to physical chastisement-nothing severe, of course-but just an occasional kick in the seat of the pants while they were bending over to change a tyre or something like that? The thought made her smile. She would even offer to administer the kick herself, which she imagined might be oddly satisfying, as one of the apprentices, the one who still kept on about girls, had a largeish bottom which she thought would be quite comfortable to kick. How enjoyable it would be to creep up behind him and kick him when he was least expecting it, and then to say: Let that be a lesson! That was all one would have to say, but it would be a blow for women everywhere.”

“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...”

“It had always struck her as wrong that we should judge ourselves-or, more usually, others-by single acts, as if a single snapshot said anything about what a person had been like over the whole course of his life. It could say something, of course, but only if it was typical of how that person behaved; otherwise, no, all it said that at that moment, in those particular circumstances, temptation won a local victory.”

“Surely it is better, thought Domenica, that forty-five should buy the book and actually read it, than should many thousands, indeed millions, buy it and put it on their shelves, like...Professor Hawking's Brief History of Time. That was a book that had been bought by millions, but had been demonstrated to have been read by only a minute proportion of those who had acquired it. For do we not all have a copy of that on our shelves, and who amongst us can claim to have read beyond the first page, in spite of the pellucid prose of its author and his evident desire to share with us his knowledge of...of whatever it is that the book is about?”

“These men were like leeches; they sucked away at the goodness of a woman's heart until it was dry and all her love had been used up. That took a long time, he knew, because women seemed to have vast reservoirs of goodness in them”