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

by Donna Leon

leaving behind this image of himself to show what he had been when he had been.

Why, he wondered, are we always so interested in the past experiences of our best beloved?

he wanted to take some sort of emotional photograph so that he could, some time in the future when things were different, pull it out of his memory and look at it and say, ‘I’ve lived a happy life.’

But the computer might reveal the man’s past, at least to a certain degree, and that might give some indication of his present and thus of Gonzalo’s likely future.

Was a preconceived notion the same thing as a prejudice?

They were there, hanging suspended, washed out and considered useless, trapped behind the glass of age. Dust gathered on the glass, and one day they weren’t there on the wall among the other fading photos,

and soon after that people began to forget what they looked like or what they had said.

Gonzalo was at least ten centimetres shorter than Gonzalo was supposed to be.

Throw the stone and then hide the hand.

They had killed everything; the only freedom left to you, really, was to kill yourself.

‘Ah,’ was all Brunetti managed to say. Like a dog jumping up to protect the home at the sound of the doorbell, his conversational feet slipped repeatedly on the polished marble floor of his mind, scratching back and forth, finding no purchase.

in her ruin, she has realized that ‘the dead care little about burial. It is the vanity of the living.’

Silence filled the space between them. Beneath it, Brunetti could sense the other man considering possibilities, excluding some and not liking the ones that remained. He was suddenly aware that he could hear the man’s breathing, deep, heavy, laboured.

Did the Englishman want to remain in free fall, knowing what must come but wanting to delay for as long as possible the news that would change things for ever?

thinking about weakness. In the truly weak, it was the object of pity, while in the arrogant it most frequently educed contempt, as was the case now.

‘It would be nice if we could choose the people we love, but love chooses them.’