How the Light Gets In (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #9)

by Louise Penny

But Isabelle Lacoste had been in the Sûreté long enough to know how much easier it was to shoot than to talk. How much easier it was to shout than to be reasonable. How much easier it was to humiliate and demean and misuse authority than to be dignified and courteous, even to those who were themselves none of those things.

I think you might know that I belong to a 12 step programme, and what Isabelle describes was one of the first things my sponsor taught me. (Though it took a while to sink in!) Just because someone pushes, doesn’t mean I need to respond. No one else gets to dictate my reaction. Only I do. It gets worse...if I want to consider myself a decent person, I need to act with decency. Huh? Easy enough to do when people are being nice. A whole other thing when the effluent is flying, in my direction. Rage might be justified, but it’s rarely necessary or constructive. Isabelle knows this, but it’s one thing for the characters to know, a whole other thing to act that way.