How much more courage it took to be kind than to be cruel.

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.

The days on which one has been the most inquisitive are among the days on which one has been happiest.

Terrorism is like jujitsu: The small players win if they make the large player use his strength against himself.

I'm a firm believer that every person, young or old, has at least one good story to tell.

They all start competing against Lincoln as the greatest president. And the [library] building becomes the symbol, the memorial to that dream.

No one on this earth attains enlightenment anymore without an enlightened master as a guide, unless that person was enlightened in many previous incarnations.

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it

The truth is, if a werewolf behaved like this psychopath it wouldn't be because he was part animal, but because he was still too human. Only humans kill for sport.

Nothing happens here in this building, in the House of Representatives, if there's no demand from outside the Capitol.

The most ordinary word, when put into place, suddenly acquires brilliance. That is the brilliance with which your images must shine.

I exist in a state of almost perpetual hysteria.