Quotes from Donna Leon

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

Detach language from meaning, and the world was yours.

The man looked to be about the same age as Paola, though he clearly had a harder time getting there...His nose was flat, as though it had once been broken, and his eyes were sad, as though his heart had been. He looked like a stevedore who wrote poetry.

He smiled at the brilliance of his perception, and Brunetti, too, smiled, delighted to hear it.

As a musician, he was as close to perfection as a man could come. It was worth putting up with the man to be able to work with the musician.

Brunetti didn't like knowing that she was right.

with renewing his offer of

Though he had repeatedly asked her not to do this, she insisted on choosing a subject at the beginning of any investigation he worked on, and she was generally wrong, for she always opted for the most obvious choice.

Like our no doubt ridiculous idea that beauty conforms to some standard or ideal; like our risible belief that we have the option to behave honourably and should take it; and like our idiotic idea that the final purpose of human existence is something more than the acquisition of wealth.

Intellectuals"?' Brunetti repeated. 'I think it's more true to say they're the cartographers of the Flat Earth Society

She stood motionless like that for

a line from Donizetti's Anna Bolena flashed through his memory—'If those who judge me are those who have already condemned me, I have no chance.

He heard a page turning beside him: Paola obviously had kept some text secreted about her person or under the cushion where she sat, left there in the event that life presented her with the necessity of spending three minutes with nothing to read.

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

locked his fingers on the arm of his

Brunetti had often reflected on this, finding it especially strange in foreigners, this belief that some cachet adhered to their address, as if living in Dorsoduro or having a palazzo on the Grand Canal could elevate the tone of their discourse or the quality of their minds, render the tedium of their lives interesting or transmute the dross of their amusements into purest gold. If

but all that you will have now, and for the rest of your lives, is loss and pain and the terrible sense that you somehow failed this boy. And no matter how deep your knowledge that you were not responsible for it, your certainty that you were will always be deeper and more absolute.

If anything, the spirit that drove him now was fiercer, but there was no denying the diminishing powers of his body. He

he and the count seemed to work among the same people, he at least had the consolation of being able to arrest them, whereas the count was constrained to invite them to dinner.

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

I know you're tired of hearing me say this, Guido, but I think plastic bottles are wrong, even though they're certainly not criminal. Though," she quickly added, "I think they will be within a few years. If we have any sense, that is.

There was no breeze, not the slightest current; the day lay like a filthy blanket upon the city.

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.

the discovery of speed.