“Montalbano felt moved. This was real friendship, Sicilian friendship, the kind based on intuition, on what was left unsaid. With a true friend, one never needs to ask, because the other understands on his own accordingly.”

“Montalbano and Valente seemed not to have heard him, looking as if their minds were elsewhere. But in fact they were paying very close attention, like cats that, keeping their eyes closed as if asleep, are actually counting the stars. ”

“What do two women friends usually do when they see each other? We talked, we watched television, we listened to music Sometimes we did nothing at all. It was a pleasure just to know the other one was there.”

“He was convinced he would keep his word. Not because he feared for his health, but because one cannot break a promise made to one's guardian angel. And he resumed the climb.”

“From the pit of his stomach a violent spasm of nausea rose up and seized his throat. He ran to the bathroom, barely able to stand, knelt down in front of the toilet and started to vomit. He vomited the whiskey he'd just drunk, vomited what he'd eaten that day as well as what he'd eaten the day before, and the day before that, and he felt, with his sweaty head now entirely inside the toilet bowl and a sharp pain in his side, as if he were endlessly vomiting up the entire time of his life on earth, going all the way back to the pap he was given as a baby, and when, at last, he'd expelled his own mother's milk, he kept vomiting poison bitterness, bile, pure hatred.”

“In grammar school he’d had an old priest as his religion teacher. “Truth is light,” the priest had said one day.Montalbano, never very studious, had been a mischievous pupil, always sitting in the last row.“So that must mean that if everyone in the family tells the truth, they save on the electric bill.”

“Unwell? I was fine, as good as one might feel in such circumstances. No, my friend, I merely pretended to faint. I'm a good actress. Actually, a thought had come into my mind: if a terrorist, I said to myself, were to blow up this church with all of us inside, at least one-tenth of all the hypocrisy in the world would disappear with us. So I had myself escorted out.”