"He’d taken each for a leisurely walk, early in their placement in homicide, and told them the four statements that led to wisdom. Never repeating them. I was wrong. I’m sorry. I don’t know. I need help.
"On it were the last words of a favorite poet, Seamus Heaney. Noli timere. It’s Latin. Do you know what it means?” He looked around the room. “Neither did I,” he admitted when no one spoke. “I had to look it up. It means ‘Be Not Afraid.’”
“The two are the same. No citizen is safe in a state where police feel free to beat those they don’t like. Who take the law into their own hands.”
"Having seen more than his share of grief, Gamache knew that Vivienne’s father must be allowed to cry, without well-meaning people trying to stop it. An act that looked like mercy but was more about their own extreme discomfort than any comfort they could offer him."
“I’m well in body,” said Clara. “But considerably rumpled up in spirit.” Reine-Marie laughed. Easily recognizing the lines from the Anne of Green Gables books she, her daughter, and now her granddaughters loved so much."
“Situational ethics?” he asked. “Don’t be smug,” Reine-Marie said. “We all have them. Even me. Even you.” She was right, of course. It was the asp at the breast of any decent cop. Any military leader. Any politician. Any mother or father. Any human. Maybe. Just this once …"
"While Jean-Guy Beauvoir explored the tangible, what could be touched, Armand Gamache explored what was felt. He went into that chaotic territory. Hunting. Searching. Tracking. Immersing himself in emotions until he found one so rancid it led to a killer."
“Is it true? Is it kind? Does it need to be said?”
“The opening of the bag is, in my opinion, a poisonous tree,” said Judge Pelletier, “and everything that stems from that act is its fruit and therefore tainted and inadmissible.”
“As I said, I’ll file an appeal,” said the prosecutor. “But that’ll take months to be heard. The poisonous tree is the most damaging ruling. It’s just unfortunate that so much stems from something so early on. It affects almost every bit of evidence.”
“What did she say?” Armand braced. “Something from St. Francis. Something he said to a woman who’d lost her child in a river.” Homer closed his eyes. “Clare, Clare, do not despair. Between the bridge and the water, I was there.”
"A self-fulfilling prophecy, thought Gamache. How often we made our worst fears come true, by behaving as though they already were.
“I think that’s why you visited him. To offer Homer that option, a way out. If not to forgiveness, perhaps to peace. It was a quote from St. Francis, to a woman who’d lost her child in a river. The thing is, I looked it up, or tried, and couldn’t find it anywhere.” “Meaning?” “Meaning, does it exist?” “Does it matter? Isn’t the power in the belief and not the proof?” She looked at him, hard."
“About human nature,” said Armand. “About obsession. About allowing rancor to cloud judgment. About what happens when we see the malice but fail to see the truth. We were all appalled by what happened to Vivienne. Even before she was found, we more than suspected that her drunken, abusive husband had done something to her. I thought that myself. I had absolutely no doubt that if something had happened to Vivienne, her husband did it.”
"When Beauvoir looked at Gamache, as he did now, he saw a man who would easily, even in a bathrobe, perhaps especially in a bathrobe, pass as a college professor. A decent and thoughtful man. Who loved sitting by the fire, or in his garden, or in the bistro with a book. He loved good food and poetry and friends. He loved his wife and children and grandchildren. And Armand Gamache loathed violence."
"As he mounted the stairs, Gamache looked back at Jean-Guy. He saw a man carefully held together. Taut. Intense. Nervous energy simmering close to the surface. Curt at times. Fierce in a fight. A man who blew off tension by happily smashing opponents into the boards in his hockey games. But out of the corner of his eye, Armand Gamache saw kindness. Loyalty. A deep, almost inconceivable capacity for love. Jean-Guy Beauvoir would stop at nothing to catch a killer. This killer."
"Then, opening his eyes, he looked at the white world and thought of the white whale. That devoured reason. All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it."
"Cameron, more used to action than talk, put up his hands in an instinctive defensive maneuver, then lowered them. He searched his vocabulary for unaccustomed words. Some way to describe feelings. Overwhelming. Unexpected. Unwanted. From the moment she’d opened the door and he’d looked into Vivienne’s eyes, he’d been branded. The emotions painful and permanent."