A Rule Against Murder

But you want murderous feelings? Hang around librarians," confided Gamache. "All that silence. Gives them ideas.

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?

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 with money.

Her tragedy was that she always found men to save her. She never had to save herself. She never knew she could.

It's a shame that creativity and sloth look exactly the same.

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.

You can tell a lot about a man by his friends, or lack of them. Do they bring out the best in each other, or are they always gossiping, tearing others down? Keeping wounds alive?

Not everything needed to be brought into the light, he knew. Not every truth needed to be told.

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 rest. It lay there, often for decades, feeding on itself, growing and gnawing, grim and full of grievance. Until it finally broke free of all human restraint. Not conscience, not fear, not social convention could contain it. When that happened, all hell broke loose. And a man became a monster.

the feelings flattened and folded and turned into something else, like emotional origami.

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.

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.

Be careful. You're making hurting a habit. Spreading it around won't lessen your pain, you know. Just the opposite.

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

…it’s not the truth about others that will set you free, but the truth about yourself.

…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 love, and to have chosen hate instead. He’d turned heaven into hell.

…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.

To live in chaos was to live in a prison. Order freed the mind for other things.

She was stuffing her innards back. Sewing herself up, putting her skin, her make-up, her party frock back on.

He was drawn to the edge of things. To the places old mariners knew, and warned, “Beyond here be monsters.”… He stepped into the beyond, and found the monsters hidden deep inside all the reasonable, gentle, laughing people. He went where even they were afraid to go.

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 the dark. And one day Jean Guy Beauvoir would look at his own monsters, and then be able to recognize others. And maybe this was the day and this was the case. He hoped so.

…walked deep into the shadow, deep into the longhouse where all his experiences and memories lived…

What could be worse? Dying, and not being missed.

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.

Have you noticed that more people seem to be dying than are being born? Bean asked, handing the section to Finney, who took it and nodded solemnly. “That means there’s more for those of us still here.” He handed the section back. “I don’t want more,” said Bean. “You will.

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.

Irene Finney filled the void with a child not loved then lost, but first lost, then loved.

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

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 disappointment, of privilege and pride. And the dagger she’d fashioned was taking a brief break from slashing her insides, and was now pointed outward.