Quotes from Donna Leon

Do you prepare these speeches when you're washing the dishes, or do such rhetorical flourishes come to you unrehearsed?' She considered his question in the spirit in which it had been asked and answered, 'I'd say they come to me quite naturally, though I imagine I'm aided by the fact that I see myself as the Language Police, ever on the prowl for infelicities or stupidities.' 'Lots of work?' he asked. 'Endless.' She

Not for the first time, he cringed when he saw his own prejudices manifest in other people.

Brunetti picked up his and took a small sip. 'I'm probably quoting him badly, but somewhere he says that the laws of the state will take care of public crimes, and that's why we need religion, so that we can believe divine justice will take care of private crime.

Yes, but I don't think it was deliberate. He just didn't get it, that the question was ambiguous and didn't mean that her brother had sex with them." "She did, though?" Brunetti nodded again. "She's much brighter than he is." "Women usually are," Paola said

love trumped principle. Paola tossed out these things

There had been no noise from any other part of the apartment, but that didn't exclude the possibility of Paolo's presence, especially if she had given her soul over to reading. He sometimes told her that Attila could storm through the house and she'd not notice if she were reading. She had most recently disputed this by claiming that it would depend on the book. Her door was open, so he went in. And found her on the sofa, with Henry James.

Why was it that the words with which we confronted death always sounded so inadequate, so blatantly false?

from exerting his full force out of consideration for what it would do to Brunetti's hand.

Patta would have fallen upon these details as a beast upon prey and torn into them in an attempt to find nourishment.

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

momento mori

In Campo San Casiano, because he felt no need to hurry, he decided to have a look at the Tintoretto Crucifixion. Brunetti had always been struck by how bored this Christ looked, stuck artfully up there on his cross, posed in front of the hedge of perpendicular spears that divided the painting in half. Christ seemed finally to have come to accept the truth of those warnings that all this business about becoming human would come to no good; He seemed eager to get back to the job of being God.

Then we must consider what an African would want to do with the money to

And so it went, the detritus of life ordered and sealed in boxes and nothing to be discarded if it might some time be used or needed again.

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)

No stinting here, not on the after-breakfast champagne.

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

Revenge, that deformed child of justice, fed itself with blind desire, incapable of seeing what was ahead, caring nothing about means or method, about what it left destroyed in its wake.

It would take, he calculated, more than an hour. First a cream-filled swan and a coffee at Tonolo, then the walk to Campo San Barnaba and the store that sold the good cheese and the bread from Puglia. He had fled his office in search of peace and quiet, seeking some evidence that sanity still existed in a world of violence and crime, and his wife suggested they spend an hour eating pastry and buying a loaf of bread. He leaped at the chance.

A wife is her husband's richest treasure, a helpmeet, a steadying column. A vineyard with no hedge will be overrun; a man with no wife becomes a helpless wanderer,"' he quoted

The Cloud of Unknowing.

There had been no noise from any other part of the apartment, but that did not exclude the possibility of Paola's presence, especially if she had given her soul over to reading. He sometimes told her that Attila could storm through the house and she'd not notice if she were reading. She had most recently disputed this by claiming that it would depend on the book.

He told her how the children were, assuring the Contessa that both of them were doing well in school, were sleeping with their windows closed against the night air, and eating two vegetables with every meal.

Hic scientia finit: Knowledge Stops Here.