Quotes from Donna Leon

He remembered that feeling, that yearly renewal of optimism that used to come to him while he was at the university, as if each year's virgin notebooks carried with them the promise of a better year, a brighter destiny.

he involved in the bankruptcy of that plastics factory? Ten years ago? Fifteen?' Of course, that was where Brunetti had read the name: the factory up near

I've always been afraid of people in possession of what they believe is the truth. They'll do anything to see that the facts are changed and whipped into shape to agree with it.

He looked at his wedding ring, twirled it around once or twice with his thumb. What pleasure it gave him to touch it, as though it were some sort of cult object, invested with magic powers, always near at hand, like a friendly spirit.

Still recovering from the idea that there existed people who sent money through the post, Brunetti asked, 'Anyone else?

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.

a woman whom the course of years had turned sour and to whom the vows meant poverty of spirit, chastity of humour, and obedience only to some rigorous concept of duty.

He remembered enough of his study of logic to recognize a slippery slope when he saw it, even in his own thinking, but still it felt right to suspect that Chiara's failure to give sympathy might somehow lead to a refusal to give aid.

His eyes were all policeman.

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

What fools men are to raze a city, destroying tombs, and temples, and sacred places, when they are so soon to die themselves.

When you're in pain, you need to think of something so that at least part of you can be free of the pain, so that your mind can go somewhere where there's no pain.

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

his own world lived in constant discovery of its own ignorance.

Brunetti had once come across the term 'compassion fatigue', but thought that the oh-so-clever press had got it wrong, and the term should really be, 'horror fatigue'.

She looked up, eyes bright. 'On the first day, before things became intolerable, an overweight, middle-aged woman from Toulouse – a statistician – whom no one paid any attention to gave a very interesting talk on what she called '"triangulation",' she said, pronouncing the English word with a French accent.

When he thought about it, it seemed to Brunetti that what he did when he came here was similar to what a person who was going to experience physical pain—an injection, exposure to sharp cold—did with his body: he tensed his muscles and concentrated, to the exclusion of all other sensation, on resisting that anticipated pain. But, instead of tightening his muscles, Brunetti found himself, if such a thing could be said to be, tightening his soul.

It's the Lord who is kind, Dottore. We merely do His service.

knew, yet his behaviour had suggested that his information was of

Death made real time meaningless

logic, that's the appeal to fear. Make people afraid of something and you can make them do what you want.

prejudice: so comforting until someone noticed

I'm worried about any group that assumes its own superiority, in any way, to other people.

Exactly what I said: she's still a child in many ways, so she's discovering all the fine and noble causes for the first time, and she still sees each one as a discrete unit: she hasn't seen the connections or contradictions among them; not yet.' She