Blood from a Stone Quotes

“Pucetti’s was the generation that was all in favour of sentiment, sharing other people’s pain, voicing compassion for the downtrodden, yet Brunetti often found in them traces of a ruthlessness that chilled his spirit and made him fearful for the future. He wondered if the cheap sentimentality of television and film had sent them into some sort of emotional insulin shock and suffocated their ability to feel empathy with the unappealing victims of the mess that real life created.”
― Donna Leon, Blood from a Stone

“When, after all, had a person involved in an argument believed themselves to be in the wrong?”
― Donna Leon, Blood from a Stone

“Perhaps the difference lay in the fact that, to the public administration, these people were problems, while to Don Alvise they were people with problems.”
― Donna Leon, Blood from a Stone

“The telefonino he thought of as belonging to Signor Rossi had spent the holiday on the top of his dresser, despised and rejected of men,”
― Donna Leon, Blood from a Stone

“Do you prepare these speeches when you’re washing the dishes, or do such rhetorical flourishes come to you unrehearsed?’ She considered his question in the spirit in which it had been asked and answered, ‘I’d say they come to me quite naturally, though I imagine I’m aided by the fact that I see myself as the Language Police, ever on the prowl for infelicities or stupidities.’ ‘Lots of work?’ he asked. ‘Endless.’ She”
― Donna Leon, Blood from a Stone

“Brunetti had forgotten to ask Bocchese if the report said where Pad was from.”
― Donna Leon, Blood from a Stone

“It would take, he calculated, more than an hour. First a cream-filled swan and a coffee at Tonolo, then the walk to Campo San Barnaba and the store that sold the good cheese and the bread from Puglia. He had fled his office in search of peace and quiet, seeking some evidence that sanity still existed in a world of violence and crime, and his wife suggested they spend an hour eating pastry and buying a loaf of bread. He leaped at the chance.”
― Donna Leon, Blood from a Stone

“Brunetti had often reflected on this, finding it especially strange in foreigners, this belief that some cachet adhered to their address, as if living in Dorsoduro or having a palazzo on the Grand Canal could elevate the tone of their discourse or the quality of their minds, render the tedium of their lives interesting or transmute the dross of their amusements into purest gold. If”
― Donna Leon, Blood from a Stone

“Then we must consider what an African would want to do with the money to”
― Donna Leon, Blood from a Stone

“Brunetti had once come across the term ‘compassion fatigue’, but thought that the oh-so-clever press had got it wrong, and the term should really be, ‘horror fatigue’.”
― Donna Leon, Blood from a Stone

“He remembered enough of his study of logic to recognize a slippery slope when he saw it, even in his own thinking, but still it felt right to suspect that Chiara’s failure to give sympathy might somehow lead to a refusal to give aid.”
― Donna Leon, Blood from a Stone

“Exactly what I said: she’s still a child in many ways, so she’s discovering all the fine and noble causes for the first time, and she still sees each one as a discrete unit: she hasn’t seen the connections or contradictions among them; not yet.’ She”
― Donna Leon, Blood from a Stone

“Hic scientia finit: Knowledge Stops Here.”
― Donna Leon, Blood from a Stone

“pasticcio”
― Donna Leon, Blood From A Stone