Now you will feel no rain, for each of you will be shelter for the other. Now you will feel no cold, for each of you will be warmth for the other.
Homes, Gamache knew, were a self-portrait. A person’s choice of color, furnishing, pictures.
A murder was never about brawn, it began and ended in the brain and the brain could justify anything.
Champlain missing was so much more potent than Champlain found.
They kill. To feel safe. It almost never worked.
Homes, Gamache knew, were a self portrait. A person’s choice of color, furnishing, pictures, every touch revealed the individual. God, or the devil, was in the details. And so was the human. Was it dirty, messy, obsessively clean? Were the decorations chosen to impress, or were they a hodgepodge of personal history? Was the space cluttered or clear? He felt a thrill every time he entered a home during an investigation.
Oscar Wilde said that conscience and cowardice are the same thing. What stops us from doing horrible things isn’t our conscience but the fear of getting caught.
The reason Armand Gamache could go there was because it wasn’t totally foreign to him. He knew it because he’d seen his own burned terrain, he’d walked off the familiar and comfortable path inside his own head and heart and seen what festered in the dark. And one day Jean Guy Beauvoir would look at his own monsters, and then be able to recognize others. And maybe this was the day and this was the case. He hoped so.
Attachment masquerades as Love, Pity as Compassion and Indifference as Equanimity.
Is it true? Is it kind? Does it need to be said?
She suspected if they looked in Gamache’s bedside table, they’d find all sorts of lost souls he put there for safekeeping. And maybe a baguette.
Rumors are hard to prove, but they’re even harder to disprove. We both know that character assassination is easy. All it takes is a suggestion. A well-placed word in someone’s ear.
You do know that the earth is round.” “The earth might be, but human nature isn’t. It has caverns and abysses and all sorts of traps.
Dr. Vincent Gilbert lived in the heart of the forest. Away from human conflict, but also away from human contact. It was a compromise he was more than happy to make.
All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it.
There is always a road back. If we have the courage to look for it, and take it.
She’d never actually smiled at a family reunion before. It felt odd.
The morning after their deaths, Armand had gone into their room. The scent of them, the sense of them, almost too much to bear. The clothing. The book. The bookmark. The bedside clock, still ticking. He’d thought that strange. Surely it should have stopped.
Hurt feelings,” said Lacoste. “I’d rather have a bruise any day.
He remembered how it felt to find himself in the library, away from possible attack but surrounded by things far more dangerous than what roamed the school corridors. For here thoughts were housed.