Unto Us a Son Is Given (Commissario Brunetti #28)

by Donna Leon

Was a preconceived notion the same thing as a prejudice?

perhaps his indignation at crime was nothing more than his distaste for those who broke the rules of fair play.

‘the dead care little about burial. It is the vanity of the living.’

we choose to love people despite their flaws and weaknesses. We train ourselves to overlook or ignore them; sometimes these failures of character even fill us with a special kind of tenderness that has nothing whatsoever in it of a sense of superiority.

Like bombs, these flaws tick quietly through our lives, and theirs, until we learn to ignore them, and then forget them. Until some unlikely impossibility causes them to explode, when finally we recognize how dangerous these people are and have been all along.