Heather Mann

“People talk of the wrench of parting, and that, he felt, was exactly what it was. Take a metal object off a magnet and one would experience that - there was the draw, the tug, the flow of the bond even through the air, and then the sudden detaching as separation occurred. That was what it was like. That was human parting. You felt it; you felt the separation, just as you would feel the rending of tissue being pulled apart.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Trains and Lovers

“The ordinary you, the you that has to go to work every morning, the you that has to run a household, pay bills, do all of those things--that you is somehow changed into an exciting, artistic, fully alive you. That's what Paris does.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Trains and Lovers

“[...] Look at the way people try to make points of contact with others when they meet. Look at the way you instinctively try to establish whether somebody you meet for the first time knows somebody you know. Watch people do it. I'm from such and such place. Oh yes? So you know So-and-So? Yes! And So-and-So? No, I don't know her, but of course, there's So-and-So. That's how it works."

"I suppose so. But why?"

"Because we don't like impersonality. Maybe..."

David joined in. "Because we had to."

She asked him: "Had to what?"

"Because he had to co-operate. That's deep in the genes. We had to co-operate with one another and so we needed to know whether the stranger was a threat. [...]”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Trains and Lovers

“Love is nothing out of the ordinary, even if we think it is; even if we idealise it, celebrate it in poetry, sentimentalise it in coy valentines. Love happens to just about everyone; it is like measles or the diseases of childhood; it is as predictable as the losing of milk teeth, or the breaking of a boy's voice.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Trains and Lovers