Kingdom of the Blind (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #14)

by Louise Penny

The memory of the heart was far stronger than whatever was kept in the mind. The question was, what did people keep in their heart?

to people who have little, a little more can seem a fortune.”

I prayed to be good and strong and wise, for my daily bread and deliverance from the sins I was told were mine from birth, and the Guilt of an old inheritance.

the real danger always came from the thing you couldn’t see.

‘Be very, very careful who you let into your life. And learn to make peace with whatever happens. You can’t erase the past. It’s trapped in there with you. But you can make peace with it. If you don’t,’ he said, ‘you’ll be at perpetual war.’”

‘And the enemy you’ll be fighting is yourself.’”

There was grace in second chances and foolishness in third. And perhaps worse than foolishness. There was, or could be, outright danger.

Some things hurtled. Some slithered. But nothing good ever came out of a blind spot.

“It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.”

praying was more to steady the person than inform the deity.

Gamache believed people could change. For the worse, yes. But also for the better. But Jean-Guy Beauvoir knew better. People did not, in his experience, fundamentally change. All that changed was their ability to better hide their worst thoughts. To put on the civilized face. But behind the smiles and polite conversation, unseen in the gloom, the rot grew and grew, and when the time was right, when the conditions were right, those terrible thoughts turned into horrific actions.

Entitlement was, she knew, a terrible thing. It chained the person to their victimhood. It gobbled up all the air around it. Until the person lived in a vacuum, where nothing good could flourish. And the tragedy was almost always compounded, Myrna knew. These people invariably passed it on from generation to generation. Magnified each time.

the four statements that lead to wisdom: I don’t know. I need help. I was wrong. I’m sorry.

And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.

Hope itself wasn’t necessarily kind. Or a good thing.

Just sail a little close to the edge.” “You do know that the earth is round.” “The earth might be, but human nature isn’t. It has caverns and abysses and all sorts of traps.”

“As a good rule of thumb, if you have to lie, you might be doing something wrong.”