Donna Leon Quotes

I raised my hand and asked if God was a spirit. And he said yes, He was. So I asked if it was right that a spirit was different from a person because it didn't have a body, wasn't material. And when he agreed, I asked how, if God was a spirit, He could be a man, if He didn't have a body or anything.

Italians know about human nature - they understand human nature perhaps better than anyone else does. They know that people are weak and greedy and lazy and dishonest and they just try to make the best of it; to work around it.

Her mask gave no sign of how this affected her.

I don't go to the movies because I don't like films.

And that, Brunetti realized, was beginning to interest him a great deal, for the answer to his death must lie there, as it always did. Santore

A man in whom violence boiled below the surface in much the same way that fresh-poured polenta waited for the chance to burn the mouth of anyone who tried to eat it.

In any other city in Italy, the fact that no one had seen or heard anything would be no more than an indication of their distrust of the police and a general unwillingness to help them. Here, however, where the people were generally law-abiding and most of the police themselves Venetians, it meant no more than that they had seen or heard nothing. If

locked his fingers on the arm of his

Why bother to put the boy who broke into a house in jail when the man who stole billions from the health system is named ambassador to the country to which he had been sending the money for years?

Perception of personal danger very often set people on the path of virtue.

A story begins and it always passes from the subjunctive to the declarative. And Italians don't seem to care about making a fine distinction between that which is speculation and that which is fact.

At one point, Paola expressed a wish and used the subjunctive, and Brunetti felt himself close to tears at the beauty of the intellectual complexity of it: she could speak about what was not, could invent an alternative reality. He

Ruth Bader Ginsburg is the most liberal and illumined of the nine Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court.

When scores of indicted criminals sit in parliament who could believe in the rule of law ...

I admire Dickens beyond words. He is one of the greatest plotters of all times. Didn't have a clue about women, but he sure could plot.

Brunetti remembered when they found themselves with an excessive catch, they chose to give it away, rather than watch it rot.

F you put people on a diet, they start thinking about food. Or if you make someone stop smoking, all they think about is cigarettes. It seems logical enough to me that if you tell a person he can't have sex, he's going to be obsessive about the subject. Then to give him the power to tell other people how to run their sex lives, well, that's just asking for trouble. In a way, it's like having a blind person teach Art History, isn't it?

The ending is one of my blackest, utterly without hope of any sort.

Brunetti shrugged. They believed him to be a member of the community of scholars...'Community of Scholars," she repeated , "It would make the chickens laugh

Belief that heresy was a form of intellectual stubbornness, the refusal to abandon a mistaken idea. In

I have no memory for what happens in what books. I don't know when I might remember a scene, but beats me what book it's in because there are 14 of them now.

The Germans and Austrians are very polite, the Swiss are very reserved and the Spanish usually kiss me. The Brits write me letters.

The character I created, 'Commissario Brunetti,' who appears in all my books, shares similar reading, artistic and musical tastes with me. Subconsciously, I knew that if I was to spend however long it would take to write this book with him, this man would have to be someone I'd like to have dinner with.

As if sensing his attention, Paola turned her head towards him and allowed her eyes to close and then open slowly, as though she'd been told that the Crucifixion had only just begun and there still remained a number of nails. The

Where does American money come from? Steel. Railways. You know how it is over there. It doesn't matter if you murder or rob to get it. The trick is in keeping it for a hundred years, and then you're aristocrats.' 'Is that so different from here?' Brunetti asked. 'Of course,' Padovani explained, smiling. 'Here we have to keep it five hundred years before we're aristocrats. And there's another difference. In Italy, you have to be well-dressed. In America, it's difficult to tell which are the millionaires and which are the servants.

Guilo, although a lawyer, never lied; at least not to his friends.

We never know them well. Do we?"
"Who?"
"Real people."
"What do you mean, real people?"
"As opposed to people in books," Paola explained. "They're the only ones we ever know well. Or know truly.

She became his Ariadne, leading him through the labyrinth of books, stopping now and then to pass another one to him.

I have always had a particular antagonism for the military.

People don't change,' she answered, voicing the wisdom Neapolitans had learned over centuries. 'If they suffer enough, they do,' Brunetti said, then quickly amended it to 'or can.' Brunetti's

That's probably because they said a lot of other things, as well.

I'm involved with a baroque opera company here in Italy. I write some of their booklet material, comments on operas. I also write for some baroque opera festivals because this music is my real passion.

I remember that's the way he was before we came out here. But then it was as if we'd come to a magic country where people changed into the person you wanted them to be, and all of a sudden my father became quiet and patient and had time to read to me.

Lampedusa had it right - things had to seem to change so that things could remain the same.

My father read 'The New York Times,' my mother did secretarial work, we had a dog, we had a garden, I had a brother.

He hesitated then, anticipating the panic that came when there was nothing left to read.
- Guido Brunetti

Italian to the core, he did not for an instant doubt that a man could be passionately devoted to the wife he betrayed with other women.

And off in the far distance, the gold on the wings of the angel atop the bell tower of San Marco flashed in the sun, bathing the entire city in its glistening benediction.

She lengthened her stride, aware at every step of how long she'd been sitting at a desk and how much her body rejoiced in this simple act of walking on the beach in the sun.

If you work with only your body, all you'll do is work for enough to eat.

So much of contemporary crime fiction is painful to read and obsessed with violence, particularly against women, and I can't read that.

Helmut thought himself above common morality. Or perhaps he thought he'd managed to create his own, different from ours, better.

hard on a curve and lost control of the

am, as an English poet says in an entirely different context, 'as free as the road, as loose as the wind.'" Brunetti

You know, Guido, at times I find it difficult to believe you do the sort of work you do. (Medical examiner's view of Commissario Guido Brunetti)

I've been thinking that of late - she said. - Thinking what? - That the world of Henry James is becoming very small for me.

Logic was my favorite class in school. I like it because it's a way to see HOW what someone says is nonsense.

Once, walking with him, Paola had stopped and asked him what he was thinking about, and the fact that she was the only person in the world he would not be embarrassed to tell just what it was he had been thinking about at that moment convinced him, though a thousand things had already done so, that this was the woman he wanted to marry, had to marry, would marry.

when children loved you, you knew everything, and when they were angry with you, you knew nothing?

Though everyone in the bar knew who he was, no one asked him about the death, though one old man did rustle his newspaper suggestively.

I love music. But I've never owned a TV in my adult life, and I've never lived in a place with a television.

We buy things. We wear them or put them on our walls, or sit on them, but anyone who wants to can take them away from us. Or break them.
...
Long after he's dead, someone else will own those stupid little boxes, and then someone after him, just as someone owned them before he did. But no one ever thinks of that: objects survive us and go on living. It's stupid to believe we own them. And it's sinful for them to be so important.

Both of them had always taken delight in this most wonderful of holdovers from the academic Stone Age, the fact that the rector of the university was addressed as "Il Magnifico Rettore," the only thing Brunetti had learned in twenty years on the fringes of the university that had managed to make academic life sound interesting to him.

His clothing marked him as Italian. The cadence of his speech announced that he was Venetian. His eyes were all policeman.

Brunetti's best friend had often said that he wanted death to take him just at the moment he laid his last lira down on a bar and said, 'Prosecco for everyone.

How beautiful, the grace of women; how soft their charity.

I never know what's going to happen in a novel. I don't have a plan or an outline.

with renewing his offer of

A man without a sense of fashion is a man without a soul.

They walked slowly, taking the shortest way, deliberately cutting through Campo delle Fava to avoid the crowds in Calle della Bissa. When they arrived at the foot of the Rialto bridge, they looked up at it, horrified. Anthill, termites, wasps. Ignoring these thoughts, they locked arms and started up, eyes on their feet and the area immediately in front of them. Up, up, up as feet descended towards them, but they ignored them and didn't stop. Up, up, up and across the top, shoving their way through the motionless people, deaf to their admiration. Then down, down, down, the momentum of their descent making them more formidable, They saw the feet of the people coming up towards them dance to the side at their approach, hardened their hearts to their protests, and plunged ahead. Then left and into the underpass, where they stopped, Brunetti's pulse raced and Paola leaned helpless on his arm.

"I can't stand it any more," Paola said and pressed her forehead against his shoulder.

South.
`But no name?,
'No, Guido. But I'll keep

She believed that books served as a mirror of the person who accumulated them.

Women don't use knives,' Griffoni answered, reciting it as though she were Euclid listing another axiom. Although he agreed with her, Brunetti was curious about the basis for her belief. 'You offering proof of that?' 'Kitchens,' she said laconically. 'Kitchens?' 'The knives are kept in the kitchen, and their husbands pass through there every day, countless times, yet very few of them get stabbed. That's because women don't use knives, and they don't stab people.

Brunetti asked, surprised how painful he still found the thought of his mother. He had tried for the last year, with singular lack of success, to tell himself that his mother, that bright-spirited woman who had raised them and loved them with unqualified devotion, had moved off to some other place, where she waited, still quickwitted and eager to smile, for that befuddled shell that was her body to come and join her so that they could drift off together to a final peace. 'I