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

Now here's a good one: you're lying on your deathbed. You have one hour to live. Who is it, exactly, you have needed all these years to forgive?

What haunted people even, perhaps especially, on their deathbed? What chased them, tortured them and brought some of them to their knees? And [he] thought he had the answer. Regret. Regret for things said, things done, and things not done. Regret for the people they might have been. And failed to be.

Let every man shovel out his own snow, and the whole city will be passable," said Gamache. Seeing Beauvoir's puzzled expression he added, "Emerson." "Lake and Palmer?" "Ralph and Waldo.

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

Every year the hunters shot cows and horses and family pets and each other. And unbelievably, they sometimes shot themselves, perhaps in a psychotic episode where they mistook themselves for dinner

Few things are better in the world than a room full of librarians. I consider them literary heroes. The keepers and defenders of the written word.