We choose our thoughts. We choose our perceptions. We choose our attitudes. We may not think so. We may not believe it, but we do. I absolutely know we do. I’ve seen enough evidence, time after time, tragedy after tragedy. Triumph after triumph. It’s about choice.
Now there will be no more loneliness,” said the minister, as he gave his final blessing on the couple. Go now to your dwelling place to enter into the days of your togetherness. And may your days be good and long upon the earth.
Happy people didn’t drink themselves to sleep every night.
Things were pretty dire when Ruth was the healing agent.
The near enemy. It’s a psychological concept. Two emotions that look the same but are actually opposites. The one parades as the other, is mistaken for the other, but one is healthy and the other’s sick, twisted.
We’re used to the film versions of psychopaths. The clearly crazies. But most psychopaths are clever. They have to be. They know how to mimic human behavior. How to pretend to care, while not actually feeling anything except perhaps rage and an overwhelming and near-perpetual sense of entitlement. That they’ve been wronged. They get what they want mostly through manipulation.
If ever two men were made for cahoots, it was these two. They were cahootites.
We were both wrong. You were afraid to stop and I was afraid to go.” “You think we’ll have less fear tomorrow?” he asked. “Not less fear,” she said. “But perhaps more courage.
Hope itself wasn’t necessarily kind. Or a good thing.
Some things hurtled. Some slithered. But nothing good ever came out of a blind spot.
Peter Morrow took no risks. He neither failed nor succeeded. There were no valleys, but neither were there mountains. Peter’s landscape was flat. An endless, predictable desert.
Which was why, Gamache knew, it was vital to be aware of actions in the present. Because the present became the past, and the past grew. And got up, and followed you.
The fault lies with us, and only us. It’s not fate, not genetics, not bad luck, and it’s definitely not Mom and Dad. Ultimately it’s us and our choices... but the most powerful spectacular thing is that the solution rests with us as well.
Irene Finney, like many very elderly people, knew that the world was indeed flat. It had a beginning and an end. And she had come to the edge.
Waiting for someone to save them. Expecting someone to save them or at least protect them from the big, bad world. The thing is no one else can save them because the problem is theirs and so is the solution. Only they can get out of it.
He knew, as a man used to fear, the great danger of letting it take control. It distorted reality. Consumed reality. Fear created its own reality.
He felt like a mobile library. Where other investigators gathered fingerprints and evidence, he gathered books.
Jesus, is Gamache hiring fetuses now?
The Chief believed if you sift through evil, at the very bottom you’ll find good. He believed that evil has its limits. Beauvoir didn’t. He believed that if you sift through good, you’ll find evil. Without borders, without brakes, without limit.
Since when do rabbits have eggs?’ Ruth persisted, looking at the bewildered villagers. ‘Never thought of that, eh? Where did it get them? Presumably from chocolate chickens. The bunny must have stolen the eggs from candy chickens who’re searching for their babies. Frantic.