Quotes from Donna Leon

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

It's convenient for us to think that the nasty emotions, hate and anger, can adhere to the lower orders, as if they owned them by right. So that leaves us, not surprisingly, to lay claim to love and joy and all those highsouled things.' He'd tried to protest, but she'd cut him short with a gesture. 'They love, the stupid and the dull and the crude, quite as strongly as we do. They just can't dress their emotions up in pretty words the way we do.

Your mother, was she clear in her mind until the end?' he asked, knowing it was invasive and cruel to do so. Because his mother had died years before her body did, Brunetti was unable to judge which sort of death was worse and for whom. In all these years, although he had asked many people who had lost a parent, he had never had an answer that would decide the case for him.

O tempora, o mores

Things happened, he knew, because other things had happened.

To serious readers like him and Paola, reading was an activity, not a pastime, and so the presence of another person added nothing to it.

Well, he'd gone this far, animated by nothing more noble than curiosity, he told himself as he studied the face of the man in the mirror, pushing his collar down over his neatly knotted tie. The man's mind slipped into English: The cat's got your tongue. Curiosity killed the cat. To stay in vein, the man in the mirror gave a Cheshire smile, and Brunetti left the house.

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

La nube del no saber —respondió el conte, e hizo una pausa—. Siempre me ha parecido un título maravilloso para una autobiografía.

He was sure, billions of of lire in art works : The Cezanne that stood to the left of the door opposite him might be worth that just by itself.

time had been busy with the flesh around her eyes and under her chin.

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

he could just tabulate all the hours he'd spent talking about politics and politicians during his life and could pack them together like a snowball and somehow add them to his life, how much longer would he live? Even more interesting, how else might he have used that time? He could have learned another language; to knit and have made sweaters or long, uneven scarves for everyone. What colour Judo belt would he be entitled to wear by now?

Aren't you ashamed that you pay all of your attention to acquiring as much money as you can, without giving any thought to truth and understanding and the perfection of your soul?

Brunetti watched Cesco trying to decide whether to say something else, so he made himself look as much like an oak tree as possible: patient, motionless, secure.

There is nothing God does not wish to be understood and investigated by reason.'' He

Is this what retirement would be for him? he wondered. Sticking his nose into other people's business whenever he had the feeling that something wasn't consistent in a story? Must every death come in a tidy package before ex-Commissario Brunetti would leave it alone and let people get on with their lives?

Se Dio vuole,' Alaimo said. Griffoni made a noise, half gasp and half laugh. 'If God wills,' she said.

Nieddu's gesture came of the same mysterious, irresistible urge to make things better for other people. For a relative, for a stranger: the urge to make things better was in our marrow.

Henry James escribió Los papeles de Aspern

flowed into and from one another, and then on to yet others, all of them tied in some way to the city in which they lived. Though they were Venetian, the conversation took place in Italian

You know how it is. After a time, something that's happened, even if it isn't very nice, if you just don't talk about it, it sort of goes away. Not that you forget about it, not really, but it isn't there any more.' Brunetti recognized the familiarity of this, and Vianello said, 'It's the only way life can go on, really, if you think about it.

We train ourselves to overlook or ignore them; sometimes these failures of character even fill us with a special kind of tenderness that has nothing whatsoever in it of a sense of superiority.

Not for the first time in his career, Brunetti reflected upon the possible advantage of censorship of the press.