Alisha

“One might forget so many exotic cheeses, he thought, but the memory of cheddar always remained. "Should one be embarrassed by choosing cheddar every time?" he asked. Matthew laughed. "There's no need to apologize for simple things." "But is cheddar simple?" Domenica enquired. "Just because there's a lot of it, does that make it simple?”
― Alexander McCall Smith

“They talked about the sorts of things they liked to talk about when there were no important decisions to be made and when the conversation could wander comfortably along uncluttered shores.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Joy and Light Bus Company

“He loved Elspeth so much, and he hoped that she knew it. Yet it occurred to him that she might not be sure of that because he had not told her – or at least he had not told her recently. Wives and husbands, it seemed to him, did not say that sort of thing: it was all left unsaid – assumed, perhaps, but not spelled out. That was the problem with life in general – we slipped into a rut in which we failed to state what we meant by the things we did. Our lives, Matthew thought, can become like silent films without the subtitles.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Enigma of Garlic

“I watched too, with that sort of lonely delight--the one shadow upon it being that it is so lonely--with which all one's life one is accustomed to watch beautiful and vanishing things.”
― Dinah Maria Mulock Craik, An Unsentimental Journey Through Cornwall