Quietly in Their Sleep Quotes

“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.”
― Donna Leon, Quietly in Their Sleep

“And will knowing what she reads make you know who she is?”
“Can you think of a better way to tell?”
― Donna Leon, Quietly in Their Sleep

“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.”
― Donna Leon, Quietly in Their Sleep

“I guess God can be whatever God wants to be. Maybe God's so great that even our little rules about material reality and our tiny little universe don't mean anything to God. You ever think of that?”
― Donna Leon, Quietly in Their Sleep

“..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?”
― Donna Leon, Quietly in Their Sleep

“a woman whom the course of years had turned sour and to whom the vows meant poverty of spirit, chastity of humour, and obedience only to some rigorous concept of duty.”
― Donna Leon, Quietly in Their Sleep

“momento mori,”
― Donna Leon, Quietly in Their Sleep

“A wife is her husband’s richest treasure, a helpmeet, a steadying column. A vineyard with no hedge will be overrun; a man with no wife becomes a helpless wanderer,”’ he quoted,”
― Donna Leon, Quietly in Their Sleep

“wife is her husband’s richest treasure, a helpmeet, a steadying column. A vineyard with no hedge will be overrun; a man with no wife becomes a helpless wanderer,”
― Donna Leon, Quietly in Their Sleep

“Buon giorno, Commissario,’ she said as she came in, her smile reminding him, fleetingly, of gelato all’ amarena–scarlet and white – colours matched by the stripes of her silk blouse. She came into the office and stepped a bit to the side, allowing another woman to come in behind her. Brunetti glanced at the second woman and was briefly conscious of a square-cut suit in cheap grey polyester, its skirt in unfashionable proximity to low-heeled shoes. He noticed the woman’s hands clasped awkwardly around a cheap imitation leather handbag, and turned his eyes back to Signorina Elettra.”
― Donna Leon, Quietly in Their Sleep

“the really hard ones, just bring them right to me.’ ‘And what will you do, Papà, tell me how you can’t help because maths is so different from when you went to school?’ Chiara asked with a laugh. ‘Isn’t that what I always do with your maths homework, cara?”
― Donna Leon, Quietly in Their Sleep

“Decades with Paola had accustomed Brunetti to the extremity of most of her positions; they had also taught him that, on the subject of the Church, she was immediately incandescent and seldom lucid.”
― Donna Leon, Quietly in Their Sleep

“He told her how the children were, assuring the Contessa that both of them were doing well in school, were sleeping with their windows closed against the night air, and eating two vegetables with every meal.”
― Donna Leon, Quietly in Their Sleep