Top 87 Donna Leon Quotes

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

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #1705
#2. Ruth Bader Ginsburg is the most liberal and illumined of the nine Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #16896
#3. The ending is one of my blackest, utterly without hope of any sort.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #37529
#4. Most people - however much they might deny it - had an idea of what they were getting into when they got into it.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #51208
#5. My father read 'The New York Times,' my mother did secretarial work, we had a dog, we had a garden, I had a brother.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #54033
#6. I think reading a translation is an act of faith.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #64160
#7. When scores of indicted criminals sit in parliament who could believe in the rule of law ...

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #69544
#8. A story begins and it always passes from the subjunctive to the declarative. And Italians don't seem to care about making a fine distinction between that which is speculation and that which is fact.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #70606
#9. I've always liked it about the Greeks that they kept the violence off the stage.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #102936
#10. 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?

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #120667
#11. All through graduate school, instead of having a television I read murder mysteries: Hammett, Chandler, Ruth Rendell, P. D. James.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #134542
#12. 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

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #138827
#13. locked his fingers on the arm of his

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #183399
#14. hard on a curve and lost control of the

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #190705
#15. 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

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #226208
#16. She became his Ariadne, leading him through the labyrinth of books, stopping now and then to pass another one to him.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #264153
#17. I listen to Handel's vocal music, almost exclusively.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #313633
#18. Why bother to put the boy who broke into a house in jail when the man who stole billions from the health system is named ambassador to the country to which he had been sending the money for years?

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #333303
#19. 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.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #412288
#20. A man without a sense of fashion is a man without a soul.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #431743
#21. 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.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #441056
#22. Brunetti's best friend had often said that he wanted death to take him just at the moment he laid his last lira down on a bar and said, 'Prosecco for everyone.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #451336
#23. Guilo, although a lawyer, never lied; at least not to his friends.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #460391
#24. I'm involved with a baroque opera company here in Italy. I write some of their booklet material, comments on operas. I also write for some baroque opera festivals because this music is my real passion.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #486844
#25. Life had taught him to be profoundly suspicious of coincidence, and it had similarly taught him to view any seemingly random conjunction of events or persons as coincidence and thus be suspicious of that, as well.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #522297
#26. I was extraordinarily lucky. I wrote a book because I wanted to see if I could write a mystery. Someone nagged me into sending it to a contest, which it won, after which I was offered a two-book contract, thus requiring the writing of a second book.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #530130
#27. Italians know about human nature - they understand human nature perhaps better than anyone else does. They know that people are weak and greedy and lazy and dishonest and they just try to make the best of it; to work around it.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #553556
#28. That's probably because they said a lot of other things, as well.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #581650
#29. 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.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #583279
#30. And will knowing what she reads make you know who she is?"
"Can you think of a better way to tell?

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #640193
#31. I've been thinking that of late - she said. - Thinking what? - That the world of Henry James is becoming very small for me.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #671368
#32. Italians tend to be less rigidly moral and law-abiding than do Anglo-Saxons. They also have a profound suspicion of the state and most of its agencies.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #690147
#33. His clothing marked him as Italian. The cadence of his speech announced that he was Venetian. His eyes were all policeman.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #721900
#34. 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.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #728653
#35. 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

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #742355
#36. am, as an English poet says in an entirely different context, 'as free as the road, as loose as the wind.'" Brunetti

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #771835
#37. Well, I don't believe it any more, none of it: I have no faith and I have no hope.' Though

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #779704
#38. Love trumped principle. Paola tossed out these things

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #819812
#39. Favors are always for ourselves. Especially when we ask for things for other people.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #820167
#40. You really love to gossip, don't you?" he asked, wishing she had brought him a glass of wine.
"Yes, I suppose I do," she answered, sounding surprised at the realization. "You think that's why I love reading novels so much?

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #829474
#41. 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.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #863358
#42. If you work with only your body, all you'll do is work for enough to eat.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #863409
#43. So much of contemporary crime fiction is painful to read and obsessed with violence, particularly against women, and I can't read that.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #865861
#44. She lengthened her stride, aware at every step of how long she'd been sitting at a desk and how much her body rejoiced in this simple act of walking on the beach in the sun.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #875299
#45. I never wanted to be rich or successful or famous. I just wanted to be happy and have fun.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #903206
#46. I have always had a particular antagonism for the military.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #943870
#47. 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.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #947899
#48. And I don't want to live anywhere where I am famous. It makes me very, very uncomfortable, because it conveys an advantage over people, and I don't like that.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #971127
#49. A man in whom violence boiled below the surface in much the same way that fresh-poured polenta waited for the chance to burn the mouth of anyone who tried to eat it.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #974383
#50. with renewing his offer of

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #986574
#51. I have no memory for what happens in what books. I don't know when I might remember a scene, but beats me what book it's in because there are 14 of them now.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #1009065
#52. I think people prefer to remember happy times, well, happier times, and if they can't remember them, then to change the memories and make them happier.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #1061190
#53. 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.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #1093352
#54. Brunetti remembered when they found themselves with an excessive catch, they chose to give it away, rather than watch it rot.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #1102743
#55. Perception of personal danger very often set people on the path of virtue.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #1110434
#56. This is a fallen world. People lie, the truth gets distorted, and that's the way it is. What's for dinner ?

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #1155588
#57. I came to Venice for the first time in 1968 and was lucky enough to make the acquaintanceship, and then the friendship, of two Venetians, Roberta and Franco, who remain my best friends here after almost 50 years.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #1174110
#58. I just go to lunch. And I never know when something is going into the file and something is not.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #1197281
#59. I was at La Fenice opera house back in 1991 with friends, and we started talking about a conductor whom none of us liked. Somehow there was an escalation, and we started talking about how to kill him, where to kill him. This struck me as a good idea for a book.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #1235984
#60. I never know what's going to happen in a novel. I don't have a plan or an outline.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #1258577
#61. Helmut thought himself above common morality. Or perhaps he thought he'd managed to create his own, different from ours, better.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #1269048
#62. Logic was my favorite class in school. I like it because it's a way to see HOW what someone says is nonsense.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #1310823
#63. He hesitated then, anticipating the panic that came when there was nothing left to read.
- Guido Brunetti

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #1312223
#64. She believed that books served as a mirror of the person who accumulated them.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #1356315
#65. Belief that heresy was a form of intellectual stubbornness, the refusal to abandon a mistaken idea. In

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #1361482
#66. Oh, so seldom does fate cast our enemy into our hands, to do with as we will

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #1362299
#67. Why are other people's prejudices so strange, while our own are so thought-out and reasonable?

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #1378047
#68. As if sensing his attention, Paola turned her head towards him and allowed her eyes to close and then open slowly, as though she'd been told that the Crucifixion had only just begun and there still remained a number of nails. The

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #1392054
#69. I do not take any pleasure whatsoever in being a famous person.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #1437887
#70. Venetians feel affection and loyalty to their city, rather than to the Italian state.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #1482004
#71. She stood motionless like that for

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #1491580
#72. the warmth and smell he associated with

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #1510381
#73. I find the idea of vigilante justice very attractive. I like the idea that the murderer decides that this person has gone too far, and nothing will happen to him unless she does something to stop him.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #1523718
#74. Brunetti had long been of the opinion that one of the handicaps of stupidity was its inability to imagine intelligence.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #1530767
#75. Lampedusa had it right - things had to seem to change so that things could remain the same.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #1567331
#76. Hic scientia finit: Knowledge Stops Here.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #1607647
#77. And off in the far distance, the gold on the wings of the angel atop the bell tower of San Marco flashed in the sun, bathing the entire city in its glistening benediction.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #1616706
#78. If anything, the spirit that drove him now was fiercer, but there was no denying the diminishing powers of his body. He

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #1618280
#79. I don't go to the movies because I don't like films.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #1619018
#80. Her mask gave no sign of how this affected her.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #1627413
#81. South.
'But no name?,
'No, Guido. But I'll keep

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #1669462
#82. Roberta Marieschi

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #1671775
#83. 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)

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #1672599
#84. Though he did not believe, he was not untouched by the magic of belief ...

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #1714293
#85. 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

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #1820004
#86. How beautiful, the grace of women; how soft their charity.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #1856414
#87. The Germans and Austrians are very polite, the Swiss are very reserved and the Spanish usually kiss me. The Brits write me letters.

Donna Leon

Donna Leon Quotes #1863638

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