I’ve been treating you with courtesy and respect because that’s the way I choose to treat everyone. But never, ever mistake kindness with weakness.

I was free. Milton was right…the mind is its own place. I was never a prisoner. Not then, not now.

Do you know why we’re all happy here, monsieur? Because it’s the last house on the road.

Wait, Armand, he heard behind him but kept walking, ignoring the calls. Then he remembered what Emile had meant to him and still did. Did this one bad thing wipe everything else out?That was the...

Joy doesn’t ever leave, you know. It’s always with you. And one day you’ll find it again.

Beauvoir was quiet, watching the Chief, taking in the gleam in his eye, the enthusiasm as he described what he’d found. Not the physical landscape, but the emotional. The intellectual.Many might have thought the Chief...

To be silent. In hopes of not offending, in hopes of being accepted. But what happened to people who never spoke, never raised their voices? Kept everything inside?Gamache knew what happened. Everything they swallowed, every...

…the most devastating thing Finney could have said. Not that Peter was hated by his father. But that he’d been loved all along. He’d interpreted kindness as cruelty, generosity as meanness, support as tethers. How...

Normally death came at night, taking a person in their sleep, stopping their heart or tickling them awake, leading them to the bathroom with a splitting headache before pouncing and flooding their brain with blood....

Murder was deeply human. A person was killed and a person killed. And what powered the final thrust wasn’t a whim, wasn’t an event. It was an emotion. Something once healthy and human had become...

They’d crossed over to that continent where grieving parents lived. It looked the same as the rest of the world, but wasn’t. Colors bled pale. Music was just notes. Books no longer transported or comforted,...

I count my blessings.

They stared ahead. Silent. Morin had never realized murderers were caught in silence. But they were.

He’d shoved his toque and mitts into the sleeve of his parka when he’d come in the night before, and now, thrusting his right arm into the armhole, he hit the blockage. At a practiced...

Let every man shovel out his own snow, and the whole city will be passable,” said Gamache. Seeing Beauvoir’s puzzled expression he added, “Emerson.””Lake and Palmer?””Ralph and Waldo.

They were home. He always felt a bit like a snail, but instead of carrying his home on his back, he carried it in his arms.

Grief was dagger-shaped and sharp and pointed inward. It was made of fresh loss and old sorrow. Rendered and forged and sometimes polished. Irene Finney had taken her daughter’s death and to that sorrow she’d...

Don’t mistake dramatics for a conscience.

And Beauvoir knew then the man was a saint. He’s been touched by any number of medical men and women. All healers, all well intentioned, some kind, some rough. All made it clear they wanted...

In winter the very ground seemed to reach up and grab the elderly, yanking them to earth as though hungry for them.

Eventually he’d let the answering machine take over and had hidden in his studio. Where he’s hidden all his life. From the monster. He could feel itin their bedroom now. He could feel its tail...

The bistro was his secret weapon in tracking down murderers. Not just in Three Pines, but in every town and village in Quebec. First he found a comfortable café or brasserie, or bistro, then he...

Great.”They’d trimmed the language to its essentials. Before long it would just be consonants. Then silence.

Gamache watched the old poet. He knew what was looming behind the Mountain. What crushed all before it. The thing the Hermit most feared. The Mountain most feared.Conscience….Which is why, Gamache knew, it was vital...

What killed people wasn’t a bullet, a blade, a fist to the face. What killed people was a feeling. Left too long. Sometimes in the cold, frozen. Sometimes buried and fetid. And sometimes on the...

Her voice was flat, in a way Myrna recognized from years of listening to people trying to rein in their emotions. To squash them down, flatten, them, and with them their words and their voices....

Life is change. If you aren’t growing and evolving you’re standing still, and the rest of the world is surging ahead. Most of these people are very immature. They lead “still” lives, waiting.

Rules meant order. Without them they’d be killing each other. It began with butting in, with parking in disabled spaces, with smoking in elevators. And it ended in murder.

Now here’s a good one:you’re lying on your deathbed.You have one hour to live.Who is it, exactly, you have neededall these years to forgive?

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...

I just sit where I’m put, composedof stone and wishful thinking:that the deity who kills for pleasurewill also heal,that in the midst of your nightmare,the final one, a kind lionwill come with bandages in her...

When someone stabs you it’s not your fault that you feel pain.

. .his cell phone didn’t work in Three Pines, and neither did email. He almost expected to see messages fluttering back and forth in the sky above the village, unable to descend.

Beauvoir left their home wanting to call his wife and tell her how much he loved her, and then tell her what he believed in, and his fears and hopes and disappointments. To talk about...

Peter swept aside Yogi Tea and Harmony Herbal Blend, though he hesitated a second over the chamomile. …. But no. Violent death demanded Earl Grey.

But we don’t have to react. That’s what I’m saying. A police force, like a government, should be above that. Just because we’re provoked doesn’t mean we have to act. — Still Life

…the pain of neuralgia…she knew what they thought. That she was cold. Couldn’t feel. But in fact she felt too much. Too deeply.

…believing sarcasm and rude remarks kept the monsters at bay. They didn’t.

As the boys screamed and hauled off handfuls of mulch, Olivier had slowly, deliberately, gently taken Gabri’s hand and held it before gracefully lifting it to his lips. The boys had watched, momentarily stunned, as...

I respect people who have such passion. Emile was saying. “I don’t. I have a lot of interests, some I’m passionate about, but not to the exclusion of everything else. I sometimes wonder if that’s...

We’re all blessed and we’re all blighted, Chief Inspector,” said Finney. “Everyday each of us does our sums. The question is, what do we count?

Three Pines wasn’t on any tourist map, being too far off any main or even secondary road. Like Narnia, it was generally found unexpectedly and with a degree of surprise that such an elderly village...

When Olivier had been taken away Gamache had sat back down and stared at the sack. what could be worse than Chaos, Despair, War?What would even the Mountain flee from? Gamache had given it a...

All Armand’s life Honoré had lived in light. Unchallenged….Armand put out his hand, and touched the door. The last room, the last door [in the longhouse]. The last territory to explore didn’t hold monstrous hate...

That was the danger. Not that betrayals happened, not that cruel things happened, but that they could outweigh all the good. That we could forget the good and only remember the bad.

People wandered in for books and conversation. They brought their stories to her, some bound, and some known by heart. She recognized some of the stories as real, and some as fiction. But she honored...

Gamache nodded. It was what made his job so fascinating, and so difficult. How the same person could be both kind and cruel, compassionate and wretched. Unraveling a murder was more about getting to know...

Where there is love there is courage,where there is courage there is peace,where there is peace there is God.And when you have God, you have everything.

She taught me that life goes on, and that I had a choice. To lament what I no longer had or be grateful for what remained.

She knew that kindness kills. All her life she’d suspected this and so she’d only ever been cold and cruel. She’d faced kindness with cutting remarks. She’d curled her lips at smiling faces. She’d twisted...