Death in a Strange Country Quotes

“And off in the far distance, the gold on the wings of the angel atop the bell tower of San Marco flashed in the sun, bathing the entire city in its glistening benediction.”
― Donna Leon, Death in a Strange Country

“She hated the predictability of herself, but knew life probably wouldn't be long enough for her to grow out of it.”
― Glen Duncan, Death of an Ordinary Man

“He looked down at the glass again. ‘I care that these things happen, that we poison ourselves and our progeny, that we knowingly destroy our future, but I do not believe that there is anything - and I repeat, anything - that can be done to prevent it. We are a nation of egoists. It is our glory, but it will be our destruction, for none of us can be made to concern ourselves about something as abstract as “the common good”. The best of us can rise to feeling concern for our families, but as a nation we are incapable of more.’

‘I refuse to believe that.’ Brunetti said.

‘Your refusal to believe it,’ the Count said with a smile that was almost tender, ‘makes it no less true, Guido.”
― Donna Leon, Death in a Strange Country

“You have a good cry, lovey, you'll feel better afterwards. You did feel better afterwards, but as if you'd conned yourself, fobbed yourself off.”
― Glen Duncan, Death of an Ordinary Man

“He had a reservoir of tolerance for pain. Finite, though. Pain would empty it, eventually.”
― Glen Duncan, Death of an Ordinary Man

“That's the problem with being alive," she says, staring at the floor. "You've got to keep thinking of what to do.”
― Glen Duncan, Death of an Ordinary Man

“Catholicism fascinated him, the contortions it put itself through to make ends meet. Father Murray had kept returning to the word 'despair.' There'd been a little (bizarre, Luke thought) linguistic diversion into Latin. Desperare, formed by the 'de' prefex, signifying the removal of or from, and 'sperare,' meaning to hope. The removal of hope. That was despair. The reasoning being that you couldn't live without hope. What Murray hadn't said (but what, along with the story of the suicide ghost, Luke remembered from childhood) was that despair was classified as a sin against the Holy Spirit. That was the perverse beauty of the religion: that your daughter could be raped and murdered and yourself still condemned for giving up hope.”
― Glen Duncan, Death of an Ordinary Man

“We are a nation of egoists. It is our glory, but it will be our destruction, for none of us can be made to concern ourselves about something as abstract as “the common good”. The best of us can rise to feeling concern for our families, but as a nation we are incapable of more.”
― Donna Leon, Death in a Strange Country

“just had a literary discussion with our daughter,’ he said. ‘She was explaining the plot of a great classic of English literature to me. I think it might be better for her if we forced her to watch the Brazilian soap operas on television. She’s in there, rooting for the fire to kill Mrs Rochester.’ ‘Oh, come on, Guido, everyone roots for the fire when they read Jane Eyre.”
― Donna Leon, Death in a Strange Country

“If criminals can’t believe in an illegal deal with the police, what can they believe in?”
― Donna Leon, Death in a Strange Country

“Drugs were suspected, though the article, in the manner of the Gazzettino, didn’t bother to specify what they were suspected of.”
― Donna Leon, Death in a Strange Country

“Like many of his townsmen, Brunetti never tired of studying the city, every so often delighting himself by discovering something he had never noticed before. Over the course of the years, he had worked out a system that allowed him to reward himself for each discovery: a new window earned him a coffee; a new statue of a saint, however small, got him a glass of wine; and once, years ago, he had noticed on a wall he must have passed five times a week since he was a child a lapidary stone that commemorated the site of the Aldine Publishing House, the oldest in Italy, founded in the fourteenth century. He had gone right around the corner and into a bar in Campo San Luca and ordered himself a Brandy Alexander, though it was ten in the morning and the barman had given Brunetti a strange look when he placed the glass in front of him.”
― Donna Leon, Death in a Strange Country

“He’s in conference. Americans seem to live in conference.”
― Donna Leon, Death in a Strange Country

“He remembered that feeling, that yearly renewal of optimism that used to come to him while he was at the university, as if each year’s virgin notebooks carried with them the promise of a better year, a brighter destiny.”
― Donna Leon, Death in a Strange Country

“Not for the first time, he cringed when he saw his own prejudices manifest in other people.”
― Donna Leon, Death in a Strange Country

“We can’t have Americans being murdered in this city, not with the state of tourism this year. Do you understand that?”
― Donna Leon, Death in a Strange Country

“She thought of herself wondering how he was going to breathe in the coffin and marveled at the stubbornness of mental habits.”
― Glen Duncan, Death of an Ordinary Man

“We are a nation of egoists. It is our glory, but it will be our destruction, for none of us can be made to concern ourselves about something as abstract as “the common good”.”
― Donna Leon, Death in a Strange Country

“check the prints. At the end of that time, he went back down to the lab”
― Donna Leon, Death in a Strange Country

“The old die softly or the old die hard,”
― Donna Leon, Death in a Strange Country

“And the sight”
― Donna Leon, Death in a Strange Country

“In any other city in Italy, the fact that no one had seen or heard anything would be no more than an indication of their distrust of the police and a general unwillingness to help them. Here, however, where the people were generally law-abiding and most of the police themselves Venetians, it meant no more than that they had seen or heard nothing. If”
― Donna Leon, Death in a Strange Country