Donna Leon Quotes

I've always liked it about the Greeks that they kept the violence off the stage.

How beautiful, the grace of women; how soft their charity.

I think reading a translation is an act of faith.

Oh, so seldom does fate cast our enemy into our hands, to do with as we will

Hic scientia finit: Knowledge Stops Here.

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

So much of contemporary crime fiction is painful to read and obsessed with violence, particularly against women, and I can't read that.

Lampedusa had it right - things had to seem to change so that things could remain the same.

I never know what's going to happen in a novel. I don't have a plan or an outline.

Perception of personal danger very often set people on the path of virtue.

Why are other people's prejudices so strange, while our own are so thought-out and reasonable?

locked his fingers on the arm of his

Favors are always for ourselves. Especially when we ask for things for other people.

His clothing marked him as Italian. The cadence of his speech announced that he was Venetian. His eyes were all policeman.

Though everyone in the bar knew who he was, no one asked him about the death, though one old man did rustle his newspaper suggestively.

And that, Brunetti realized, was beginning to interest him a great deal, for the answer to his death must lie there, as it always did. Santore

My father read 'The New York Times,' my mother did secretarial work, we had a dog, we had a garden, I had a brother.

She became his Ariadne, leading him through the labyrinth of books, stopping now and then to pass another one to him.

the warmth and smell he associated with

If you work with only your body, all you'll do is work for enough to eat.

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

I just go to lunch. And I never know when something is going into the file and something is not.

Venetians feel affection and loyalty to their city, rather than to the Italian state.

Love trumped principle. Paola tossed out these things

I know you shouldn't spit in your own soup but I think most crime writing is like TV and doesn't make enormous demands on one's intellect.

Logic was my favorite class in school. I like it because it's a way to see HOW what someone says is nonsense.

This is a fallen world. People lie, the truth gets distorted, and that's the way it is. What's for dinner ?

South.
'But no name?,
'No, Guido. But I'll keep

Roberta Marieschi

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

I listen to Handel's vocal music, almost exclusively.

I don't go to the movies because I don't like films.

Sit around the bars, talked to people, ate in the restaurants, and chatted with the old ladies on the street. Fishermen are pretty much that way.

I have always had a particular antagonism for the military.

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

with renewing his offer of

The ending is one of my blackest, utterly without hope of any sort.

Most people - however much they might deny it - had an idea of what they were getting into when they got into it.

Helmut thought himself above common morality. Or perhaps he thought he'd managed to create his own, different from ours, better.

I do not take any pleasure whatsoever in being a famous person.

She stood motionless like that for

hard on a curve and lost control of the

Ruth Bader Ginsburg is the most liberal and illumined of the nine Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Her mask gave no sign of how this affected her.

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)

I love music. But I've never owned a TV in my adult life, and I've never lived in a place with a television.

Well, I don't believe it any more, none of it: I have no faith and I have no hope.' Though

And will knowing what she reads make you know who she is?"
"Can you think of a better way to tell?

I admire Dickens beyond words. He is one of the greatest plotters of all times. Didn't have a clue about women, but he sure could plot.

She believed that books served as a mirror of the person who accumulated them.

The Germans and Austrians are very polite, the Swiss are very reserved and the Spanish usually kiss me. The Brits write me letters.

A man without a sense of fashion is a man without a soul.

I never wanted to be rich or successful or famous. I just wanted to be happy and have fun.

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

Brunetti remembered when they found themselves with an excessive catch, they chose to give it away, rather than watch it rot.

Though he did not believe, he was not untouched by the magic of belief ...

He hesitated then, anticipating the panic that came when there was nothing left to read.
- Guido Brunetti

All through graduate school, instead of having a television I read murder mysteries: Hammett, Chandler, Ruth Rendell, P. D. James.

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

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

Brunetti had long been of the opinion that one of the handicaps of stupidity was its inability to imagine intelligence.

When scores of indicted criminals sit in parliament who could believe in the rule of law ...