"Antonia was very conscious of the corrosive power of envy and felt that it was this emotion, more than any other, which lay behind human unhappiness. People did not realise how widespread envy was."

"It was time for tea as it so often was."

"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."

"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."

"Will you be my friend?” Bertie asked. And then added: “Just for Paris. You don’t have to be my friend forever – just for Paris."

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

"Mma Ramotswe did not like lying, but sometimes it was necessary, particularly when faced with people who were promoted beyond their talents."

"She remembered love, though, and a feeling of warmth. It was like remembering light, or the glow that sometimes persists after a light has gone out."

"None of us is immune to shipwreck. Come, beckons the fatal shore: come and die on my white sands, it said. And we do."

"I'd like to be tidy, said Hen, I try, but I guess you can't be what you aren't."

"Myth is a cloud based upon a shadow based upon the movement of the breeze."

"...it must be odd to have no ambition, not to want something more."

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

"You say that you lost your child. You know how I feel then. You know that, don't you? It's a sadness that never goes away."

"She had noticed that there was a tendency on the part of some Americans to believe that everybody, deep inside, wanted to live in America, and that it was inexplicable that people who could do so did not."

"The young rarely believe that they will not be able to get what they want, because there is always an open future."

"It is my duty to help them solve the mysteries in their lives. That is what I am called to do."

"Lightning always strikes in the same place twice," said Mma Ramotswe. "Whatever people say to the contrary."

"Well, that's the important thing, isn't it, Mma? To feel happiness, and then to remember it."

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

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

"Perhaps if you don't know there's a gap, you don't worry about it. If you were a millipede, a tshongololo, crawling along the ground would you look at the birds and worry about not having wings? Probably not."

"...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 person?"

"That's the curious thing about love, isn't it? It makes very ordinary things seem special. It makes them seem so much more valuable than they really are."