Quotes from Donna Leon

It would be nice if we could choose the people we love, but love chooses them.

even the worst men wanted to be perceived as better than they were. How else could hypocrisy have risen to such delirious levels?

wish that some sorts of love would decide to speak their names a bit less loudly. Did people not realize how tiresome so much of this conversation was to anyone who thought the sexual behaviour of other people was not a matter to discuss or judge?

Decades with Paola had accustomed Brunetti to the extremity of most of her positions; they had also taught him that, on the subject of the Church, she was immediately incandescent and seldom lucid.

Drugs were suspected, though the article, in the manner of the Gazzettino, didn't bother to specify what they were suspected of.

Roberta Marieschi

Brunetti had recently read a book that said a goshawk could see the veins in the wings of a butterfly: who knew what could be seen? Or felt. Possibility was limitless, each of us a separate universe of choice and capacity.

As he started down towards his office, Brunetti thought about how taking a look at one's unconscious motives and prejudices was like walking barefoot through cloudy water: you never knew whether you were going to step on something disgusting or bang your toe into a rock.

A love that dared not speak its name'? In recent years, Brunetti had come to wish that some sorts of love would decide to speak their names a bit less loudly. Did people not realize how tiresome so much of this conversation was to anyone who thought the sexual behaviour of other people was not a matter to discuss or judge?

Another bridge, then open water on one side. On the other was the Basilica and the Palazzo, and Brunetti had the sudden realization that, though none of this belonged to him, he belonged to all of it.

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

Older people longed for the world not to change so there would be no cost to themselves.

Old books had always filled Brunetti with nostalgia for centuries in which he had not lived.

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.

Young people longed to change the world, regardless of the cost to themselves or others.

a great comfort faith can be to those left behind.

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

say something like that? The poor boy

I guess God can be whatever God wants to be. Maybe God's so great that even our little rules about material reality and our tiny little universe don't mean anything to God. You ever think of that?

Brunetti had forgotten to ask Bocchese if the report said where Pad was from.

if 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?

We are a nation of egoists. It is our glory, but it will be our destruction, for none of us can be made to concern ourselves about something as abstract as "the common good".

The telefonino he thought of as belonging to Signor Rossi had spent the holiday on the top of his dresser, despised and rejected of men

year advanced. But in these first weeks it fell only on the