A Noble Radiance Quotes

“Italian to the core, he did not for an instant doubt that a man could be passionately devoted to the wife he betrayed with other women.”
― Donna Leon, A Noble Radiance

“And now he lay, a pile of clean bones and tatters of flesh, in a box in a church, and even the policeman, sent to find his killer, could summon up no real grief at his early death.”
― Donna Leon, A Noble Radiance

“He dealt every day with people who believed they weren’t happy and who further believed that by committing some crime—theft, murder, deceit, blackmail, even kidnapping—they would find the magic elixir that would transform the perceived misery of their lives into that most desired of states: happiness”
― Donna Leon, A Noble Radiance

“They love, the stupid and the dull and the crude, quite as strongly as we do. They just can’t dress their emotions up in pretty words the way we do.”
― Donna Leon, A Noble Radiance

“Qualche garbuglio si troverà.”
― Donna Leon, A Noble Radiance

“It’s convenient for us to think that the nasty emotions, hate and anger, can adhere to the lower orders, as if they owned them by right. So that leaves us, not surprisingly, to lay claim to love and joy and all those highsouled things.’ He’d tried to protest, but she’d cut him short with a gesture. ‘They love, the stupid and the dull and the crude, quite as strongly as we do. They just can’t dress their emotions up in pretty words the way we do.”
― Donna Leon, A Noble Radiance

“During his life, Brunetti had often heard people begin sentences with, ‘If it weren’t for him . . .’ and he could not hear the words without substituting Sergio’s name. When Brunetti, always the acknowledged scholar of the family, was eighteen, it was decided that there was not enough money to allow him to go to university and delay the time when he could begin to contribute to the family’s income. He yearned to study the way some of his friends yearned for women, but he assented to this family decision and began to look for work. It was Sergio, newly engaged and newly employed in a medical laboratory as a technician, who agreed to contribute more to the family if it would mean that his younger brother would be allowed to study. Even then, Brunetti knew that it was the law he wanted to study, less its current application than its history and the reasons why it developed the way it had. Because there was no faculty of law at Ca Foscari, it meant that Brunetti would have to study at Padova, the cost of his commuting adding to the responsibility Sergio agreed to assume. Sergio’s marriage was delayed for three years, during which time Brunetti quickly rose to the top of his class and began to earn some money by tutoring students younger than himself. Had he not studied, Brunetti would not have met Paola in the university library, and he would not have become a policeman. He sometimes wondered if he would have become the same man, if the things inside of him that he considered vital would have developed in the same way, had he, perhaps, become an insurance salesman or a city bureaucrat. Knowing idle speculation when he saw it, Brunetti reached for the phone and pulled it towards him.”
― Donna Leon, A Noble Radiance

“Brunetti picked up his and took a small sip. ‘I’m probably quoting him badly, but somewhere he says that the laws of the state will take care of public crimes, and that’s why we need religion, so that we can believe divine justice will take care of private crime.”
― Donna Leon, A Noble Radiance

“Brunetti asked, surprised how painful he still found the thought of his mother. He had tried for the last year, with singular lack of success, to tell himself that his mother, that bright-spirited woman who had raised them and loved them with unqualified devotion, had moved off to some other place, where she waited, still quick witted and eager to smile, for that befuddled shell that was her body to come and join her so that they could drift off together to a final peace.”
― Donna Leon, A Noble Radiance