Carl

“When Olivier had been taken away Gamache had sat back down and stared at the sack. what could be worse than Chaos, Despair, War?

What would even the Mountain flee from? Gamache had given it a lot of thought.

What haunted people even, perhaps especially, on their deathbed? What chased them, tortured them and brought some of them to their knees? And Gamache thought he had the answer.

Regret.

Regret for things said, for things done, and not done. Regret for the people they might have been. And failed to be.

Finally, when he was alone, the Chief Inspector had opened the sack and looking inside had realize he'd been wrong. The worst thing of all wasn't regret.”
― Louise Penny, The Brutal Telling

“She slowly became convinced…that at the center of the universe not God but a tremendous deadness reigned. The stillness of a drunk God, passed out cold…She had learned of it in that house…where the drunks crashed…Things had happened to her there. She was neither raped nor robbed, nor did she experience God’s absence to any greater degree than other people did. She wasn’t threatened or made to harm anyone against her will. She wasn’t beaten, either, or deprived of speech or voice. It was, rather, the sad blubbering stories she heard in the house. Delphine witnessed awful things occurring to other humans. Worse than that, she was powerless to alter their fate. It would be that way all her life – disasters, falling like chairs all around her, falling so close they disarranged her hair, but not touching her.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Master Butchers Singing Club

“As Delphine watched, into her head there popped a strange notion: the idea that perhaps strongly experienced moments, as when Eva turned and the sun met her hair and for that one instant the symbol blazed out, those particular moments were eternal. Those moments actually went somewhere. Into a file of moments that existed out of time's range and could not be pilfered by God.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Master Butchers Singing Club

“I just sit where I'm put, composed
of stone and wishful thinking:
that the deity who kills for pleasure
will also heal,
that in the midst of your nightmare,
the final one, a kind lion
will come with bandages in her mouth
and the soft body of a woman,
and lick you clean of fever,
and pick your soul up gently by the nape of the neck
and caress you into darkness and paradise.”
― Louise Penny, The Brutal Telling