But never, ever mistake kindness for weakness.
We don’t just sing; we are the song.
If you don’t know something, ask. You have to be able to admit you don’t know something, otherwise you’ll just get more and more confused, or worse, you’ll jump to a false conclusion. All the mistakes I’ve made have been because I’ve assumed something and then acted as though it was fact.
What kills can’t be seen, the Chief had warned Beauvoir. That’s what makes it so dangerous. It’s not a gun or a knife or a fist. It’s not anything you can see coming. It’s an emotion. Rancid, spoiled. And waiting for a chance to strike.
Fear might stop some people from committing murder, but he knew for certain fear was what drove most people to kill. It was what nested below all the other emotions. It was what twisted and turned the other emotions into something sick. It was an alchemist and could turn daylight into night, joy into despair. Fear, once taken root, blocked the sun. And Gamache knew what grew in that darkness. He searched for it every day.
When a woman commits to something she does it with both her heart and her head. Very powerful.
Everything he let go of had claw marks on it.
Gabri plugged the oven and the espresso machine into the generator,’ explained Olivier. ‘No lights, but we have the necessities.
Their creations eventually die of neglect, of malnourishment. And sometimes, when that happens the artist also dies.
And she knew that that was why drugs were so dangerous. Because they blew the mind. Not the heart. But the mind. And the heart followed. And the soul followed that.
Dear God, thought Gamache, save me from a huffy priest.
Their reasons are their own,’ he finally said. ‘I don’t have to care.
Yes, facts were necessary. But frankly, anyone could be trained to collect a bloodstain or find a hair. Or an affair. Or a bank balance that didn’t balance. But feelings? Only the bravest wandered into that fiery realm.
It smelled of the past, of a time before computers, before information was “Googled” and “blogged.” Before laptops and BlackBerries and all the other tools that mistook information for knowledge.
She’d arrived a self-sufficient city woman, and now she was covered in snow, sitting on a bench beside a crazy person, and she had a duck on her lap. Who was nuts now?
In grief people were themselves and not themselves.
Ruth believed in precycling. An evolution on recycling. She made use of things before people threw them out.
Henri kept everything important in his heart. He mostly kept cookies in his head.
Like a ship changing course. It might take a while to get to port, but at least it was going in the right direction.
But he’d come to agree with Sister Prejean that no one was as bad as the worst thing they’d done. Armand Gamache had seen the worst. But he’d also seen the best. Often in the same person.