“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.”

“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.”

“Giulio was against our meeting. He didn't want me getting mixed up in things that, in his opinion, were no concern of mine. For decades the respectable people here did nothing but repeat that the Mafia was no concern of theirs but only involved the people involved in it. But I used to teach my pupils that the see-nothing, know-nothing attitude is the most mortal of sins. So now that its my turn to tell what I saw, I'm supposed to take a step back?”

“And in our dark days, with so many threatening clouds on the horizon, he concluded, we puff up a story like this to drug people, to distract theirattention from the serious problems anddivert them with a Romeo-and-Julietstory, one scripted, however, by a soap opera writer.”

“He also remembered a comedy he had read in his youth called “The Deluge”, which claimed the next great flood would be caused not by water from the heavens but by the backing up and over flowing of all the toilets, latrines, cesspools and septic tanks in the world which would start chucking up their contents relentlessly until we all drowned in our own shit.”

“In moments of crisis, all you gotta do is review your multiplication tables, and it’ll all blow over!”

“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.”