A Great Reckoning Quotes
"And yet, when he held the file he didn’t feel any warmth. In fact, he felt vaguely revolted."
"But for now the children slept and their parents slept. Everyone in the small Québec village slept, while the snow fell and Armand Gamache considered the young lives that lay at his feet."
"For years, decades, as head of homicide for the Sûreté du Québec, his job had been to dig. To collect evidence. To review facts, and question feelings. To pursue and arrest. To use his judgment, but never to judge."
"The curtains of his study fluttered and he could feel a cold draft coming in through the slightly open window. And he knew if he drew back the curtains and turned on the porch light, he would see the first snow of the season swirling in the light."
"It was the beginning of November and this was an early snow even by Québec standards. A tease, a portent."
"Armand Gamache realized, without great surprise, that it was a role he was comfortable with. Even liked. The power, yes. He was honest enough to admit that."
"It wasn’t her appearance. He knew enough to look beyond that."
"He limped still, sometimes, when he was tired. But besides that, and the scar, there were no outward signs of what had happened."
"Armand had listened politely, often offering them lunch or dinner or a place to stay if it was late. But never tipping his hand."
"In the chaos of the renovations, the papers had simply been dumped in the pine blanket box and forgotten."
"They left behind them angels in the snow."
"A man’s foes shall be they of his own household, eh, Armand?"
"He wasn’t worried. He was the Duke. And all this belonged to him."
"Have you come all this way to taunt me?"
"Anyone could take something by force, but not many could get someone to surrender without a fight."
"It was a view that never failed to move him, so much did he love Québec."
"What mattered wasn’t what the building looked like but what happened inside."
"The only ones the recruits could really trust were their confrères in the Sûreté."
"He’d followed the man who’d betrayed him for years."
"It was, as Gamache had said, a cesspool. But it was a task that needed to be done."
"Ruth loves words and uses them intentionally. Even the thoughtless words were used with thought."
"The keen young man beside her, with bright red hair and a gay vibe even the blackboard could feel, tsked at her."
"The commander of the academy himself was teaching this course, though it was far from clear what the course was about."
"I was hanged for living alone, for having blue eyes and a sunburned skin."
"The Universe is change. Life is opinion."
"What we say and what we mean can sometimes be two different things, depending on what we want to hear."
"Secrets aren’t treasure, you know. Secrets don’t make you powerful. They make you weak. Vulnerable."
"Every homicide I’ve investigated started as a secret."
"There’s something strange about that map. I feel it."
"I think they also might have been the happiest. We were so young. Is it possible?"
"Sides had been chosen, allegiances declared, the game of Red Rover was over."
"Most of our secrets are pretty benign. Things we’re ashamed to tell others because they make us look bad."
"If you're not true to yourself, how can you ever recognize the truth in others?"
"Everything I ask has a purpose, and never more so than now."
"This is a murder investigation, not a get-together for coffee."
"Your secrets will come out. I'm giving you a chance to tell me quietly."
"Character is not created in times like these. It’s revealed."
"It's too easy to feed the anger. Too cowardly to stoke the hate."
"Make no mistake, it will all come to light."
"A lot will be revealed that people had hoped to keep hidden."
"It was an age-old form of torture. Some considered it training. Torment, relent. Torment. Relent."
"But motive was missing. It was not enough to simply say he blew. There had to be a reason."
"You taught fraud. You taught students how to spot it and yet you missed it when it was happening in your own house?"
"Most murderers manage to justify their actions. They don’t see what they’ve done as wrong."
"That’s life in the real world. You sat here most of the afternoon ordering food. Then you went to the B and B and ate all the cake. Well, here’s the bill."
"And when you’re an old woman, we’ll tolerate it from you too."
"You’ve been conscripted to help in a homicide investigation. Do you know how many cadets would love to be included?"
It seemed wise," said the Commander. "For everyone's protection.
"But abused children become desperate to please the abuser, to appease them."
"They learn early and quickly that if they don’t, they pay a price."
"No child would risk upsetting the parent who beat them."
"A strong, often brutal, personality, takes over. He’s followed out of fear, not respect or loyalty."
"The fewer who know where the students are the better."
"I took them there to protect them, not to hide them."
"These students are my responsibility. Their training is entrusted to me, and so is their safety."
"I wouldn’t have brought him here if I didn’t think there was good still in him."
"We’re asking these young men and women to be willing to die in that uniform."
"I think Monsieur Gamache thought so, and he rowed out to get her."
"It’s as though you’re just begging me to suspect you."
"The rot went even deeper than that and ended in catastrophe. But not the great scale of disaster it would have been had Armand Gamache not stopped it."
"The Sûreté had been cleaned out, but there remained the academy. The training ground for cruelty and corruption."
"The corrosion within the Sûreté and subsequent events were well known to the general public. The media had covered it to the point of their own brutality."
"What interested Gélinas now was what was unknown. The men’s personal lives."
"A shrewdness of apes," Myrna read from the reference book, smiling and shaking her head in amusement, before looking up to see Armand and the others arrive.
"A murder of crows is believed to come from a folk tale, where crows will gather to decide the capital fate of another crow."
"Imagine what that does to a child. And yet he rose above it."
"His parents were killed by a drunk driver when he was a child."
"I’m Chief Inspector Lacoste. I’m leading the investigation into the murder of Serge Leduc."
I think he said he was crazy," said Clara. "Loco.
"The only one I know is a murder of crows," said Lacoste.
"We don’t know, do we? Isn’t that the point of an investigation? To investigate."
"You aren’t the only ones with unhappy childhoods. Some are beaten. Some are bullied. Some are ignored."
"They can drive us to do things we never thought ourselves capable of. Wonderful achievements, like becoming Chief Inspector and Commander. Or horrific things. Terrible dark deeds."
"The good news is, we do have another queen," said Olivier, glancing at Gabri.
"But the key to the crime was in the prints."
"The worst, perhaps, were the number of missing, presumed dead."
"It’s one thing to read the names etched into the wood, and another to hear them out loud. The old poet’s voice like the tolling of a bell."
"Things are strongest where they're broken."
"We are all of us marred and scarred and imperfect."
"It's so easy to get mired in the all too obvious cruelty of the world."
"It's human to be curious. It was superhuman to put it back down."
"If we have the courage to look for it, and take it."
"Kindness beats cruelty. In the long run. It really does."
"We make mistakes. We do things we deeply regret."
"It’s our humanity that allows us to find criminals."
"We’re too far gone, or so we think. We’re tired and we’re confused and we’re scared."