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’.
Again, she put her face in her hands and wiped away the years, then let them return and looked at him.
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,
He involved in the bankruptcy of that plastics factory? Ten years ago? Fifteen?’ Of course, that was where Brunetti had read the name: the factory up near
A man in whom violence boiled below the surface in much the same way that fresh-poured polenta waited for the chance to burn the mouth of anyone who tried to eat it.
When you’re in pain, you need to think of something so that at least part of you can be free of the pain, so that your mind can go somewhere where there’s no pain.
We never know them well. Do we?Who?Real people.What do you mean, real people?As opposed to people in books, Paola explained. They’re the only ones we ever know well. Or know truly.
Vianello had the knack of getting people to talk. Especially if they were Venetians, the people he interviewed invariably warmed to this large, sweet-tempered man who gave every appearance of speaking...
To serious readers like him and Paola, reading was an activity, not a pastime, and so the presence of another person added nothing to it.
They walked slowly, taking the shortest way, deliberately cutting through Campo delle Fava to avoid the crowds in Calle della Bissa. When they arrived at the foot of the Rialto bridge, they looked up...
Then, as if Truth had reminded her to whom she was speaking, she added, ‘But I wasn’t surprised.
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 ch...
People don’t change,’ she answered, voicing the wisdom Neapolitans had learned over centuries. ‘If they suffer enough, they do,’ Brunetti said, then quickly amended it to ‘or can.’ Brunetti’s
Nor has the extent of your prosperity produced any change in you, except that it has given you the power of doing good to the utmost of your wishes. And whilst all these circumstances increase the ven...
I’ve always liked it about the Greeks that they kept the violence off the stage.
Her glance put him on the scales and weighed him, and then she said, ‘Less trouble accepting reality, I think.
For reasons he had never understood, she read a different newspaper each morning, spanning the political spectrum from right to left, and languages from French to English. Years ago, when he had first...
Aren’t you ashamed that you pay all of your attention to acquiring as much money as you can, without giving any thought to truth and understanding and the perfection of your soul?
Come face to face with this reminder of what we all know and feel uncomfortable knowing: that life plugs along, no matter what happens to any of us. It puts one foot in front of the other, whistling a...
Why bother to put the boy who broke into a house in jail when the man who stole billions from the health system is named ambassador to the country to which he had been sending the money for years?