Donna Leon

Though everyone in the bar knew who he was, no one asked him about the death, though one old man did rustle his newspaper suggestively.

Guilo, although a lawyer, never lied; at least not to his friends.

I raised my hand and asked if God was a spirit. And he said yes, He was. So I asked if it was right that a spirit was different from a person because it didn't have a body, wasn't material. And when he agreed, I asked how, if God was a spirit, He could be a man, if He didn't have a body or anything.

..if you put people on a diet, they start thinking about food. Or if you make someone stop smoking, all they think about is cigarettes. It seems logical enough to me that if you tell a person he can't have sex, he's going to be obsessive about the subject. Then to give him the power to tell other people how to run their sex lives, well, that's just asking for trouble. In a way, it's like having a blind person teach Art History, isn't it?

I came to Venice for the first time in 1968 and was lucky enough to make the acquaintanceship, and then the friendship, of two Venetians, Roberta and Franco, who remain my best friends here after almost 50 years.

I never wanted to be rich or successful or famous. I just wanted to be happy and have fun.

And I don't want to live anywhere where I am famous. It makes me very, very uncomfortable, because it conveys an advantage over people, and I don't like that.

You really love to gossip, don't you?_ he asked, wishing she had brought him a glass of wine.__es, I suppose I do,_ she answered, sounding surprised at the realization. __ou think that's why I love reading novels so much?

She became his Ariadne, leading him through the labyrinth of books, stopping now and then to pass another one to him.

We buy things. We wear them or put them on our walls, or sit on them, but anyone who wants to can take them away from us. Or break them....Long after he's dead, someone else will own those stupid little boxes, and then someone after him, just as someone owned them before he did. But no one ever thinks of that: objects survive us and go on living. It's stupid to believe we own them. And it's sinful for them to be so important.

Oh, so seldom does fate cast our enemy into our hands, to do with as we will

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.

Most people _ however much they might deny it _ had an idea of what they were getting into when they got into it.

Her mask gave no sign of how this affected her.

Perception of personal danger very often set people on the path of virtue.