Older Woman, Younger Man: Quotable Quotes from The Right Attitude to Rain

The book I just finished reading (Alexander McCall Smith's The Right Attitude to Rain) is about a woman in her early 40's, well-off, beautiful and a successful editor of a philosophy journal, who falls in love with Jamie, a much younger attractive man.

Yun lang, Jamie was a recent ex-bf of Isabel's niece, Cat, who has been changing boyfriends in an attempt to find the RIGHT one.

Kaya ayun, the novel has some very interesting hugot lines.

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"To him she was just another friend, nothing more, and one could talk like that to a mere friend. And that, she thought, is my personal tragedy. As long as I am afraid to tell him of my love, to confess it to him, then I shall have to pretend that we are just friends on this level."

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"For each of us, she thought, there is our completeness in another. Whether we find it or not, or it finds us, or it eludes all finding, is a matter of moral luck."

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"When you are with somebody you love the smallest, smallest things can be so important, so amusing, because love transforms the world, everything."

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"Why should I not love him? she asked herself. How absurd that we should deny ourselves something when our moment of life is so brief, our very world is transitory."

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All that mattered, therefore, was that happiness and love should have their chance, their brief chance, in this life, before annihilation and the nothingness to which we were all undoubtedly heading, even our sun, which was itself destined for collapse and extinction, signifying the end of the party for whomsoever was left.

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She did not have to apologize for Jamie; she did not have to apologize to anybody for her happiness.

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Human affairs though, were reduced to monetary calculation all the time, and marriage had traditionally been about money every bit as much as it had been about love.

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'Be prepared to shed tears when you get to my age and you think back on lost opportunities. Somebody asked me to live with.....' there was the briefest hesitation and then, '........with her. I said no, because people would talk.'

'We shouldn't care so much about disapproval', said Isabel. 'But we do, don't we?'