Quotes About Perception

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

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.

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

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?

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.

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

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

Perhaps the difference lay in the fact that, to the public administration, these people were problems, while to Don Alvise they were people with problems.

Brunetti thought of Parliament in the way most Italians thought of their mothers-in-law.

At times Brunetti thought Italy was a country where everyone knew everything while no one was willing to say anything. In private, everyone was eager to comment with absolute certainty on the secret doings of politicians, Mafia leaders, movie stars; put them into a situation where their remarks might have legal consequences, and Italy turned into the largest clam bed in the world.

It seems to me it's getting harder and harder to tell the difference," he said. "Between what?" "The criminal and the wrong." "Why do you think that is, Guido?" "I'm not sure. Perhaps because, as you said before, we don't believe in the old things anymore, and we haven't found anything new, anything else, to believe in.

Her glance put him on the scales and weighed him, and then she said, 'Less trouble accepting reality, I think.

when children loved you, you knew everything, and when they were angry with you, you knew nothing?

Death made real time meaningless

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

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

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.

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.

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)

And the sight

Germans found American (by which they often meant Irish) bars and their drinking customs both peculiar and unhealthy.