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
#2. Ruth Bader Ginsburg is the most liberal and illumined of the nine Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Donna Leon
#3. The ending is one of my blackest, utterly without hope of any sort.
Donna Leon
#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
#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
#6. I think reading a translation is an act of faith.
Donna Leon
#7. When scores of indicted criminals sit in parliament who could believe in the rule of law ...
Donna Leon
#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
#9. I've always liked it about the Greeks that they kept the violence off the stage.
Donna Leon
#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
#11. All through graduate school, instead of having a television I read murder mysteries: Hammett, Chandler, Ruth Rendell, P. D. James.
Donna Leon
#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
#13. locked his fingers on the arm of his
Donna Leon
#14. hard on a curve and lost control of the
Donna Leon
#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
#16. She became his Ariadne, leading him through the labyrinth of books, stopping now and then to pass another one to him.
Donna Leon
#17. I listen to Handel's vocal music, almost exclusively.
Donna Leon
#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
#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
#20. A man without a sense of fashion is a man without a soul.
Donna Leon
#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
#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
#23. Guilo, although a lawyer, never lied; at least not to his friends.
Donna Leon
#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
#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
#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
#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
#28. That's probably because they said a lot of other things, as well.
Donna Leon
#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
#30. And will knowing what she reads make you know who she is?"
"Can you think of a better way to tell?
Donna Leon
#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
#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
#33. His clothing marked him as Italian. The cadence of his speech announced that he was Venetian. His eyes were all policeman.
Donna Leon
#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
#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
#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
#37. Well, I don't believe it any more, none of it: I have no faith and I have no hope.' Though
Donna Leon
#38. Love trumped principle. Paola tossed out these things
Donna Leon
#39. Favors are always for ourselves. Especially when we ask for things for other people.
Donna Leon
#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
#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
#42. If you work with only your body, all you'll do is work for enough to eat.
Donna Leon
#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
#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
#45. I never wanted to be rich or successful or famous. I just wanted to be happy and have fun.
Donna Leon
#46. I have always had a particular antagonism for the military.
Donna Leon
#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
#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
#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
#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
#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
#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
#54. Brunetti remembered when they found themselves with an excessive catch, they chose to give it away, rather than watch it rot.
Donna Leon
#55. Perception of personal danger very often set people on the path of virtue.
Donna Leon
#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
#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
#58. I just go to lunch. And I never know when something is going into the file and something is not.
Donna Leon
#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
#60. I never know what's going to happen in a novel. I don't have a plan or an outline.
Donna Leon
#61. Helmut thought himself above common morality. Or perhaps he thought he'd managed to create his own, different from ours, better.
Donna Leon
#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
#63. He hesitated then, anticipating the panic that came when there was nothing left to read.
- Guido Brunetti
Donna Leon
#64. She believed that books served as a mirror of the person who accumulated them.
Donna Leon
#65. Belief that heresy was a form of intellectual stubbornness, the refusal to abandon a mistaken idea. In
Donna Leon
#66. Oh, so seldom does fate cast our enemy into our hands, to do with as we will
Donna Leon
#67. Why are other people's prejudices so strange, while our own are so thought-out and reasonable?
Donna Leon
#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
#69. I do not take any pleasure whatsoever in being a famous person.
Donna Leon
#70. Venetians feel affection and loyalty to their city, rather than to the Italian state.
Donna Leon
#71. She stood motionless like that for
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#72. the warmth and smell he associated with
Donna Leon
#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
#74. Brunetti had long been of the opinion that one of the handicaps of stupidity was its inability to imagine intelligence.
Donna Leon
#75. Lampedusa had it right - things had to seem to change so that things could remain the same.
Donna Leon
#76. Hic scientia finit: Knowledge Stops Here.
Donna Leon
#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
#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
#79. I don't go to the movies because I don't like films.
Donna Leon
#80. Her mask gave no sign of how this affected her.
Donna Leon
#81. South.
'But no name?,
'No, Guido. But I'll keep
Donna Leon
#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
#84. Though he did not believe, he was not untouched by the magic of belief ...
Donna Leon
#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
#86. How beautiful, the grace of women; how soft their charity.
Donna Leon
#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
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