. .his cell phone didn't work in Three Pines, and neither did email. He almost expected to see messages fluttering back and forth in the sky above the village, unable to descend.

The night is a strawberry.

Myrna could spend happy hours browsing bookcases. She felt if she could just get a good look at a person’s bookcase and their grocery cart, she’d pretty much know who they were.

The four sayings that lead to wisdom: I was wrong I'm sorry I don't know I need help

Life is change. If you aren't growing and evolving, you're standing still, and the rest of the world is surging ahead.

Fear lives in the head. And courage lives in the heart. The job is to get from one to the other.

No good ever comes from putting up walls. What people mistake for safety is in fact captivity. And few things thrive in captivity.

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

Better to accept the wretched truth than struggle, twisting to make a wish a reality.

When someone stabs you it's not your fault that you feel pain.

Where there is love there is courage, where there is courage there is peace, where there is peace there is God. And when you have God, you have everything.

Honor has not to be won

Age is only a number. Keep an active life.

There’s merit in being different, inspiration in being individual, courage in being unique, and freedom in being yourself.

Smile! Accept hatred with love.

Ultimately there is no power to narcissistic, self-indulgent thinking. Authentic thinking originates with an encounter with the world.

I got the idea [for Anthem's theme] in my school days, in Soviet Russia, when I heard all the vicious attacks on individualism, and asked myself what the world would be like if men lost the word 'I.'

Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day.

Death is always, under all circumstances, a tragedy, for if it is not then it means that life has become one.

First guitars tend to be like first loves: ill-chosen, unsuitable, short-lived and unforgettable.

I think it's probably a good thing to be considered stable, but with a capacity for madness.