Diana

“if you had no language, then what form did your thoughts take—if you thought at all? Of course you thought—she had never had any difficulty with accepting that—but how limited would your thoughts be in the absence of any words to express them?”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Forgotten Affairs Of Youth

“A woman is like a tea bag; you never know how strong it is until it's in hot water.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt

“Self-doubt was a luxury, as, perhaps, was the examined life. And yet the examined life, as the adage had it, was the only life worth living.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Forgotten Affairs Of Youth

“How do you calibrate pain?” asked Jamie. “By cutting out the background pain of the world,” answered Isabel. “By cutting all that out, not registering it, and responding only to those painful things that we can do something about. Because otherwise …”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds