The madness of crowds was a terrible thing to see. The madness of police with clubs and guns was even worse.
Sauve qui peut.
If stupid was sand, he’d be half the Sahara.
Don’t get me wrong, I believe in using your head, but not in spending too much time in there. Fear lives in the head, and courage lives in the heart. The job is to get from one to the other.
At my age I’ve long since stopped caring what others think.
No,” said Armand. “The outside won’t change, but the inside might. We can but hope.” “We can do more than that, Chief Inspector, if we choose. Hope on its own is rarely enough.
They’re angry. Unstable. And no doubt armed.
C. S. Lewis wrote that we can create situations in which we are happy, but we cannot create joy. It just happens.
As a diversion, few things were as effective as chocolate cake.
You’re wrong there,’ said Ruth, following Myrna’s gaze. ‘This used to be my drug of choice. In my teens my drug of choice was acceptance, in my twenties it was approval, in my thirties it was love, in my forties it was Scotch. That lasted a while,’ she admitted. ‘Now all I really crave is a good bowel movement.
You’re not quite as ignorant as you pretend, Chief Inspector.” “Oh, my ignorance knows no bounds, Father.
Though dour and childless himself, the grocer was unfailingly kind and patient with children. As though instead of having none, he had them all.
Tea lights were lit and placed on the table and around the garden, so that it looked like large fireflies had settled in for the evening.
I don’t know, Armand. It made me sick. And sad. And glad I live far – ” “From the madding crowd?” Vincent Gilbert smiled and nodded. “Yes. I peek out every now and then, then scuttle back to my little cabin, where I hope so-called civilization won’t find me.
She was beginning to see how quickly something completely normal could suddenly seem sinister, if you chose to see it that way.
But they, better than most, knew that no place was really safe from physical harm. Anything could happen to anyone, at any moment. What made a place safe were the people. The caring. The kindness. The helping. Sometimes the mourning. And often the forgiveness.
Do no harm was part of Hippocrates’s writing, but from a different text. On epidemics.
What was that Milton quote we were raised with? “The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
Armand Gamache was never more glad he’d married this woman, who made his battles theirs.
Knowledge, ideas, thoughts. Imagination. All invisible. All lived in libraries.