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Donna Leon

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Famous Donna Leon Quotes

“When he stepped out onto the altana, he was immediately intoxicated by the view. He thought for a moment that he could reach out, pick up the cupolas of la Salute, and slip them quietly into his pocket.He toyed with the idea of putting the bell tower in beside them, but he feared it would be too long and stick out, so he turned around and decided he'd settle on taking San Francesco della Vigna's instead.”

ImaginationWhimsy
Book:A Refiner’s Fire
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“Have you been reading the letters of Rosa Luxemburg again, Donatella?’ Brunetti asked in a normal voice. She laughed her bright laugh, a sound he delighted in hearing because to be thought clever or amusing by this woman was, to Brunetti, a jewel of great price. ‘No dear, not recently. Besides, they’re very serious and filled with lofty thoughts about the inner contradictions of capitalism, and I’m too old to enjoy reading things like that.’ She gave him a level glance as though she were testing how far she could go – the same look he had sometimes been given by her daughter – and added, ‘And too rich.’ This time it was Brunetti who laughed.”

CapitalismLettersRosa LuxemburgLofty Thoughts
Book:Give Unto Others
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“Yes, I was just thinking.’ ‘About what?’ ‘About how a writer can make the most awful things…’ Brunetti didn’t want to say ‘beautiful’, but that was what he meant. ‘Can make them powerful,’ he chose instead. It wasn’t the same, but it was also true. She surprised him by saying, ‘I’ve never understood why you studied law.’ She picked up her coffee and took a sip. ‘I’m not sure I do either.’ ‘Do you regret it?’ He shook his head. ‘No, the law is beautiful. It’s like building a cathedral.’ ‘You’ve lost me,’ Paola said with a smile.”

LawWriterPower Of Words
Book:Unto Us a Son Is Given
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“..if you put people on a diet, they start thinking about food. Or if you make someone stop smoking, all they think about is cigarettes. It seems logical enough to me that if you tell a person he can't have sex, he's going to be obsessive about the subject. Then to give him the power to tell other people how to run their sex lives, well, that's just asking for trouble. In a way, it's like having a blind person teach Art History, isn't it?”

ReligionSexObsessionPaola
Book:Quietly in Their Sleep
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“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.”

BookReadingHenry JamesAttila
Book:Transient Desires
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“The autumn had been unseasonably dry, and the vines that had taken up residence on the canal side of the brick wall surrounding the property extended themselves in parched desperation towards the water. Brunetti was struck by the resemblance between the vines, exposed to the sun almost all day, every day, and The Raft of the Medusa. The human limbs in the foreground of the painting, like the vines on the wall, fell weakly towards the water, while the figures behind stretched towards a glimpse of what might be a boat, a speck of land, or yet another swiftly arriving wave, bent on their destruction. How much worse the vines looked than the men on the raft, even though the accounts of the incident that had inspired the painting spoke of dehydration and starvation.”

PaintingAutumnStarvationVinesDroughtDehydrationBrunettiRaft Of The Medusa
Book:Give Unto Others
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“Given Loreti's position in society, the press had followed, panting. But they were to be disappointed by the police's failure to find any sign of what the English call "foul play," and so the investigation had been downsized to "missing person," whereupon the articles began to grow shorter and the pages on which they were printed further to the back of the newspapers. After a month or two, the articles followed the person into obscurity. Brunetti, who often saw things in a literary way, thought of this as a transposed simile. In the first days, the Loreti case was compared to some crime from the past. After a year, a new crime was compared to the Loreti disappearance. Over the years and generations, it had drifted into the distant past, Brunetti realized: from sensation to footnote.”

TimeMediaCrime
Book:So Shall You Reap
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“Brunetti, no fan of television, did occasionally watch nature documentaries, and so he was familiar with the pose cobras took when they were preparing to attack. They somehow managed to raise their heads about thirty centimetres into the air and begin a graceful side-to-side motion that Brunetti always found quite hypnotizing, They flicked their tongues in an out, in and out, preparing to strike, while their intended prey froze and tried to figure out what to do. Long familiarity with his wife's tactics had somehow transferred portions of the genetic code of the mongoose into Brunetti, suggesting to him the correct motions that would remove him safely from the target area. "For one thing, it makes us sensitive to the fact that they might be at risk of blackmail." "I see," she said. "Anything else?" "Well, since most people have a bad opinion of the police, I'd like to tell you that many of us feel a certain sympathy for them." "I see," Paola said. As he watched, her tongue ceased to flicker and disappeared into her mouth, and she ceased her restless side-to-side motion, turning again into his wife, the treasure and joy of his life.”

RelationshipsMarriage
Book:So Shall You Reap
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“We buy things. We wear them or put them on our walls, or sit on them, but anyone who wants to can take them away from us. Or break them. ... Long after he's dead, someone else will own those stupid little boxes, and then someone after him, just as someone owned them before he did. But no one ever thinks of that: objects survive us and go on living. It's stupid to believe we own them. And it's sinful for them to be so important.”

ThinkingWantBelieveLittlesLongImportantBreakStupidObjectsWallGoes OnBoxes
Author:Donna Leon
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