Donna Leon People Quotations

Italians know about human nature - they understand human nature perhaps better than anyone else does. They know that people are weak and greedy and lazy and dishonest and they just try to make the best of it; to work around it.

favors are always for ourselves. Especially when we ask for things for other people.

Sit around the bars, talked to people, ate in the restaurants, and chatted with the old ladies on the street. Fishermen are pretty much that way.

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.

This is a fallen world. People lie, the truth gets distorted, and that's the way it is. What's for dinner ?