Friends in High Places Quotes

“Many people at Rialto?’ ‘Not when I got there,’ she answered, ‘but by the time I was leaving, it was packed. Most of them were tourists, come, as far as I could see, to take pictures of other tourists. In a few years, we’ll have to get there at dawn or we won’t be able to move.’ ‘Why do they go to Rialto?’ he asked. ‘To see the market, I suppose. Why?’ ‘Don’t they have markets in their countries? Don’t they sell food?’ ‘God knows what they have in their countries,’ Paola answered with the slightest suggestion of exasperation. ‘What”
― Donna Leon, Friends in High Places

“see,’ Brunetti said, tired of listening to the sort of empty compliments which death demanded be paid.”
― Donna Leon, Friends in High Places

“Death made real time meaningless,”
― Donna Leon, Friends in High Places

“At times Brunetti thought Italy was a country where everyone knew everything while no one was willing to say anything. In private, everyone was eager to comment with absolute certainty on the secret doings of politicians, Mafia leaders, movie stars; put them into a situation where their remarks might have legal consequences, and Italy turned into the largest clam bed in the world.”
― Donna Leon, Friends in High Places

“Things happened, he knew, because other things had happened.”
― Donna Leon, Friends in High Places

“conoscienze: acquaintances, friendships, contacts and debts built up over a lifetime of dealing with a system generally agreed, even by those in its employ, perhaps especially by those in its employ, to be inefficient to the point of uselessness, prone to the abuses resultant from centuries of bribery, and encumbered by a Byzantine instinct for secrecy and lethargy.”
― Donna Leon, Friends in High Places

“but all that you will have now, and for the rest of your lives, is loss and pain and the terrible sense that you somehow failed this boy. And no matter how deep your knowledge that you were not responsible for it, your certainty that you were will always be deeper and more absolute.”
― Donna Leon, Friends in High Places

“Well, I don’t believe it any more, none of it: I have no faith and I have no hope.’ Though”
― Donna Leon, Friends in High Places

“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, Friends in High Places