Armand Gamache had seen the worst. But he’d also seen the best. Often in the same person.
We just don’t know. The key is to keep going. Joy might be just around the corner.
Happiness as an act of defiance. A revolutionary act.
You need to remember that, Jean-Guy. The blindness you mention isn’t believing in the essential goodness of people, it’s failing to see it.
A loss like this was a progression of miseries, like stepping-stones. Until they reached the other side. The new continent. Where the terrible reality lived, and the sun never fully came out again. But where, with time and help, they might find acceptance and, with that, peace.
You’re catastrophizing, allowing fear into the driver’s seat. You’re reacting to things that haven’t happened and behaving as though they have, or are inevitable. Focus on what is actually happening, here and now.” “Surrender to reality,” he said with a small grin and, grabbing a tissue, he rubbed his eyes. It was one of Hardye Moel’s favorite sayings. “Yes. Stop fighting battles that don’t exist. Focus on what does.
The sofa always reminded him of the Monty Python sketch when a man, about to be tortured in the Inquisition, was threatened with the “comfy chair.” Dear God, he thought, not the sofa. It was an unexpected, certainly unintended, torture, though Clara didn’t seem to see it. The springs had long since let go, so that you either hit the concrete floor or, worse, a spring. He hovered over it for a moment, then, like a cliff diver, he committed.
But being essentially a dumpster fire herself, she was familiar with flames.
The bar was, in fact, a library. A place Dickens would have been comfortable in. Where Conan Doyle might have found a useful volume. Where Jane Austen could sit and read. And get drunk, if she wanted.
Monarda was the zucchini of the flower world. It, too, figured prominently in the harvest market and, subsequently, the Thanksgiving bonfire, which would give off a hint of sweet bergamot so that it smelled as though every cottage in Three Pines was brewing Earl Grey tea.
Clara found it easy to forgive most things in most people. Too easy, her husband Peter often warned. But Clara had her own little secret. She didn’t really let go of everything. Most things, yes. But some she secretly held and hugged and would visit in moments when she needed to be comforted by the unkindness of others.
What the village in the valley offered was a place to heal. It offered company and companionship, in life and at the end of life. It offered a surefire cure for loneliness.
All shall be well. And all shall be well. And all manner of thing shall be well. It was a quote from one of Gamache’s favorite writers, the Christian mystic Julian of Norwich. Who’d offered hope in a time of great suffering.
Jean Guy Beauvoir was loosely wrapped but tightly wound.
Evil is unspectacular, and always human, And shares our bed and eats at our own table, And we are introduced to Goodness every day. Even in drawing rooms, among a crowd of faults.
He was reminded again what Abbie Hoffman had said: We must eat what we kill. That would put an end to war.
Matthew 10:36. ‘And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.
I’m sorry.’ ‘I was wrong.’ ‘I don’t know.
But what happened to people who never spoke, never raised their voices? Kept everything inside? Gamache knew what happened. Everything they swallowed, every word, thought, feeling rattled around inside, hollowing the person out. And into that chasm they stuffed their words, their rage.
The mixture of cafe au lait and impatience was producing an exquisite vibration.
You gave him The Gashlycrumb Tinies?” asked Stephen. “By Edward Gorey? Oh, I think I really do love you,” he said to Ruth.