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Book: Corduroy Mansions
Quotes of Book: Corduroy Mansions

Alexander McCall Smith _ Corduroy Mansions
It must be frustrating being a poet-or any sort of artist-and not being able to offend anyone any more.
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Alexander McCall Smith _ Corduroy Mansions
Manfred's interventions, he thought, had all the characteristics of radio jamming, designed to stop anybody else talking.
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Alexander McCall Smith _ Corduroy Mansions
He knew that one should not punch people who annoyed one, although there was a case for it at times, a seemingly irresistible case.
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Alexander McCall Smith _ Corduroy Mansions
He was one of those people, she thought, who just seemed to know a great deal. And he spoke so wisely, as if had thought for hours about everything he said.
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Alexander McCall Smith _ Corduroy Mansions
Why should everybody embrace the herd instinct, which required one to regard one set of politicians as being always in the right while demonizing another set?
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Alexander McCall Smith _ Corduroy Mansions
Barbara said to herself: Oh, please, please, please! Please let nothing go wrong with this-this wildly improbable, impossible, but gorgeous thing. She was not sure to whom to address this invocation. To Venus, perhaps? If the goddess of love were listening, she would surely cherish such an invocation and understand the urgency, the yearning, that lay behind it.
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Alexander McCall Smith _ Corduroy Mansions
It was Lennie Marchbanks at the door. She had met him once or twice before and rather liked him; mechanics struck her as being such easy, agreeable people. And, she noticed, as a psychotherapist, one never had a mechanic for a patient. Why was that? Were they invariably balanced people, free of the neuroses that afflicted non-mechanically-minded others?
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Alexander McCall Smith _ Corduroy Mansions
There were women in the sacred dance group, no doubt, and one of these might be taken aside, woman to woman, and asked to help see that he came to no harm. England was full of helpful women, Berthea was convinced: there were legions of them, all anxious to help in some way and many of them feeling quite frustrated that there were not quite enough men-for demographic reasons-in need of their help.
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Alexander McCall Smith _ Corduroy Mansions
Everybody was a potential assailant; nobody spoke to one another for fear of being misinterpreted; nobody comforted another, put an arm around a shoulder-to do so would be to invite accusation.
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Alexander McCall Smith _ Corduroy Mansions
So, in less elevated circles, we might toss a coin as to whether or not to go to a party, decide to go, and there meet the person whom we are to marry and spend our lives with. And if that person came, say, from New Zealand, and wanted to return, then we might find ourselves spending our life in Christchurch. Not that spending one's lifetime in Christchurch is anything less than very satisfactory-who among us would not be happy living in a city of well-behaved people, within reach of mountains, where the civic virtues ensure courtesy and comfort and where the major problems of the world are an ocean away? But had the coin fallen the other way-as coins occasionally do-then that wholly different prospect might never have opened up and one might spend the rest of one's days in the place where one started out. Or one might pick up a newspaper abandoned in a train by a person not well schooled in those same civic virtues, open it and chance to see an advertisement for a job that one would not otherwise have seen. And that same job might take one into the path of risk, and that very risk may materialise and end one's life prematurely. Again the act of picking up the paper has consequences unglimpsed at the time, but profound nonetheless.
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