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?
Do you know the sums that I do?” “I count my blessings.
I saw a lot of men die there. Most men. Do you know what killed them?”…”Despair,” said Finney. “They believed themselves to be prisoners. I lived with those men, ate the same maggot-infested food, slept in the same beds, did the same back-b...
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 wretched and bloated and finally buried. But not put to...
Irene Finney, like many very elderly people, knew that the world was indeed flat. It had a beginning and an end. And she had come to the edge.
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 shores of a lake, isolated. Left to grow old, and odd.
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 added a long life of entitlement and ...
Do you know why we’re all happy here, monsieur? Because it’s the last house on the road.
…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 horrible to have been offered ...
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.
They spoke in semaphore, all punctuation unnecessary. “You?” “Great.” They’d trimmed the language to its essentials. Before long it would just be consonants. Then silence.
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 or bitterness or rancid resentmen...
The only thing money really buys?...Space. A bigger house, a bigger car, a larger hotel room. First-class plane tickets. But it doesn't even buy comfort. No one complains more than the rich and entitled. Comfort, security, ease. None of them come wit...
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 ...
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.
…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.
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.
