“It was at this point that Bilbo stopped. Going on from there was the bravest thing he ever did. The tremendous things that happened afterward were as nothing compared to it. He fought the real battle in the tunnel alone, before he ever saw the vast danger that lay in wait.”

“What's the bravest thing you ever did?He spat in the road a bloody phlegm. Getting up this morning, he said.”

“Wait, Armand, he heard behind him but kept walking, ignoring the calls. Then he remembered what Emile had meant to him and still did. Did this one bad thing wipe everything else out?That was the danger. Not that betrayals happened, not that cruel things happened, but that they could outweigh all the good. That we could forget the good and only remember the bad.But not today. Gamache stopped.”

“Every battle is won before it’s ever fought.”

“No one ever said aloud any of the kinds of things he was so constantly thinking, because no one in the parish, not Alice, not Lady Higgs, not anybody, ever seemed to see the things he saw. If they thought as he did, if they saw what he did, they never mentioned it; and to have things which are precious to one eternally unmentioned makes one, he had long discovered, lonely. These August nights, for instance—remarkably and unusually beautiful, warm and velvety as he had never known them, ushered in each evening by the most astonishing variety of splendid sunsets—nobody had said a single word about them. They might have been February ones, for all the notice they got. Sometimes he climbed up to the top of Burdon Down towards evening, and stood staring in amazement at what looked like heaven let loose in flames over England; but always he stood alone, always there was no one but himself up there, and no one afterwards, when he descended from his heights, seemed to be aware that anything unusual had been going on.”

“People felt themselves watching him even before they knew that there was anything different about him. His eyes made a person think that he heard things that no one else had ever heard, that he knew things no one had ever guessed before. He did not seem quite human.”