The Chief had once told him about the behavior of gorillas when faced with an attack. They met it head on, staring down the enemy. But every now and then they’d reach out to touch the gorilla beside them. To make sure they were not alone. Keeping his eyes on the road, Jean-Guy reached out and touched Gamache’s shoulder.
He often said that words told them what someone was thinking, but the tone told them how they felt.
I asked him to leave because he stopped caring for me, stopped supporting me. Not because I’d stopped caring for him.
Good hearts get hurt. Good hearts get broken, Armand. And then they lash out.
Their lives could not be defined by their deaths. They belonged not in perpetual pain but in the beauty of their short lives.
We can all fall,” said the abbot. “But perhaps not as hard and not as fast and not as far as someone who spends his life on the ascent.
But he realized Henri already knew all he’d ever need. He knew he was loved and he knew how to love.
And fear. High school smelled of that more than anything else, even more than sweaty feet, cheap perfume and rotten bananas.
Where once his grandparents put up crucifixes and images of the benediction on their walls, he and Reine-Marie put up books on theirs. History books. Reference books. Biographies. Fiction, nonfiction. Stories lined the walls and both insulated them from the outside world and connected them to it.
Yes, I do. The ones who aren’t growing and evolving, who are standing still. They’re the ones who rarely got better.’ ‘Yes, that was it,’ said Gamache. ‘They waited for life to happen to them. They waited for someone to save them. Or heal them. They did nothing for themselves.’ ‘Ben,’ said Peter.
He stared for ten seconds or more, which, when eating a chocolate cake isn’t much, but when staring, is.
He was tired of the tyranny of the greater good.
Armand Gamache had seen the worst. But he’d also seen the best. Often in the same person.
The fault is here, but so is the solution. That’s the grace.
No. The real danger in a garden came from the bindweed. That moved underground, then surfaced and took hold. Strangling plant after healthy plant. Killing them all, slowly. And for no apparent reason, except that it was its nature. And then it disappeared underground again.
That was why she was happy. He now knew that happiness and kindness went together. There was not one without the other.
Most of the people came through my door because of a crisis in their lives, and most of those crises boiled down to loss. Loss of a marriage or an important relationship. Loss of security. A job, a home, a parent. Something drove them to ask for help and to look deep inside themselves. And the catalyst was often change and loss.
Once again the fate of reckless youth was being decided by old men behind closed doors.
She painted what appeared to be portraits, but that was only on the surface. The beautifully rendered flesh stretched, and sometimes sagged, over wounds, over celebrations. Over chasms of loss and rushes of joy. She painted peace and despair. All in one portrait. With brush and canvas and oils, Clara both captured and freed her subject.
Irene Finney filled the void with a child not loved then lost, but first lost, then loved.