The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency

by Alexander McCall Smith

READ IT! 

If you know you won’t read it, read these pieces I pulled from this book to add to my commonplace book. 

In a very short time, he knew, there would be men wanting to marry her.
  He would never deny her that, of course.  But what if the man who wanted to marry her was a bully, or a drunkard, or a womaniser?  All of this was possible; there was any number of men like that, waiting for an attractive girl that they could latch on to and whose life they could slowly destroy.  These men were 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. 
  If one of these men claimed Precious, then what could he, a father, do?  He could warn her of the risk, but whoever listened to warnings about somebody they loved?  He had seen it so often before; love was a form of blindness that closed the eyes to the most glaring faults.  you could love a murderer, and simply not believe that your lover would do so much as crush a tick, let alone kill somebody.  There would be no point trying to dissuade her.
 
 
…nothing, nothing, that was what her country was so rich in–emptiness.
 
She made it sound so simple that he found himself convinced that it would work.  That was the wonderful thing about confidence–it was contagious.
 
…they [lawyers] set themselves up as experts on everything.  What did they know of life?  All they knew was how to parrot the stock phrases of their profession and to continue to be obstinate until somebody, somewhere, paid up.
 
She did not like his voice.  It was sandpaper rough, and he slurred the ends of the words lazily, as if he could not be bothered to make himself clear.  This came from contempt, she felt;  if you were as powerful as he was, then why bother to communicate properly with your inferiors?
 
Women can’t be bothered with all this fighting.  We see war for what it is–a matter of broken bodies and crying mothers.
 
Mma Ramostwe smiled at her old friend.  You can go through life and make new friends every year–every month practically–but there was never any substitute for those friendships of childhood that survive into adult years.  Those are the ones in which we are bound to one another with hoops of steel.
 
There was so much suffering in Africa that it was tempting just to shrug your shoulders and walk away.  But you can’t do that, she thought.  You just can’t.