Top 450 Louise Penny Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “What did falling in love do for you? Can you ever really explain it? It filled empty spaces I never knew were empty. It cured a loneliness I never knew I had. It gave me joy. And freedom. I think that was the most amazing part. I suddenly felt both embraced and freed at the same time.”

— Louise Penny

102. “They’d crossed over to that continent where grieving parents lived. It looked the same as the rest of the world, but wasn’t. Colors bled pale. Music was just notes. Books no longer transported or comforted, not fully. Never again. Food was nutrition, little more. Breaths were sighs. And they knew something the rest didn’t. They knew how lucky the rest of the world was.”

— Louise Penny

103. “After all, it’s how the light gets in.”

— Louise Penny

104. “Any real act of creation is first an act of destruction. Picasso said it, and it’s true. We don’t build on the old, we tear it down. And start fresh.”

— Louise Penny

105. “Most unhappiness comes from not being able to sit quietly in a room.”

— Louise Penny

106. “Funny how imperfections on the outside mean something splendid beneath.”

— Louise Penny

107. “Sounds like being a therapist. People normally came into my office because something happened. Someone had died, or betrayed them. Their love wasn’t reciprocated. They’d lost a job. Gotten divorced. Something big. But the truth was, while that might’ve been the catalyst, the problem was almost always tiny and old and hidden.”

— Louise Penny

108. “Kindness beats cruelty.”

— Louise Penny

109. “The fault lies with us, and only us. It’s not fate, not genetics, not bad luck, and it’s definitely not Mom and Dad. Ultimately it’s us and our choices... but the most powerful spectacular thing is that the solution rests with us as well.”

— Louise Penny

110. “I often think we should have tattooed on the back of whatever hand we use to shoot or write, “I might be wrong.”

— Louise Penny

111. “She took the long way home,” said Ruth. “Some do, you know. They seem lost. Sometimes they might even head off in the wrong direction. Lots of people give up, say they’re gone forever, but I don’t believe that. Some make it home, eventually.”

— Louise Penny

112. “Just because it’s the truth doesn’t make it less insulting.”

— Louise Penny

113. “The world turned upside down,′ Beauvoir continued. ‘It was at once more beautiful and more frightening than you’d been led to believe. And suddenly you didn’t know what to do. Who to trust. Where to turn. It’s terrifying. Being lost is so much worse than being on the wrong road. That’s why people stay on it for so long.”

— Louise Penny

114. “Look at Nuremberg. Why did the Holocaust happen?” “Because deluded, power-crazy leaders needed a common enemy,” said Clara. “No,” said Myrna. “It happened because no one stopped them. Not enough people stood up soon enough.”

— Louise Penny

115. “That’s a huge one, of course. Most of us are great with change, as long as it was our idea. But change imposed from the outside can send some people into a tailspin. I think Brother Albert hit it on the head. Life is loss. But out of that, as the book stresses, comes freedom. If we can accept that nothing is permanent, and change is inevitable, if we can adapt, then we’re going to be happier people.”

— Louise Penny

116. “I’ve realised that anyone can be a critic but it takes a remarkable person to offer praise.”

— Louise Penny

117. “Apart they were individual colors, but together they made giddy light.”

— Louise Penny

118. “Anyone so damaged as to cause this much harm led a life full of secrets and full of enemies.”

— Louise Penny

119. “What was it Oscar Wilde said?” “I can resist everything except temptation.”

— Louise Penny

120. “We all have, she knew, a place where we’re not only most comfortable, but most competent.”

— Louise Penny

121. “Some things hurtled. Some slithered. But nothing good ever came out of a blind spot.”

— Louise Penny

122. “The mess in the drawers was in contrast to the neat desktop. Many people’s lives were like that. The neat room and the messy closet. The well-ordered counters and the chaos in the cabinets.”

— Louise Penny

123. “A populist feeding anger and fear is more likely to get elected.”

— Louise Penny

124. “A loss like this was a progression of miseries, like stepping-stones. Until they reached the other side. The new continent. Where the terrible reality lived, and the sun never fully came out again. But where, with time and help, they might find acceptance and, with that, peace.”

— Louise Penny

125. “Dr. Vincent Gilbert lived in the heart of the forest. Away from human conflict, but also away from human contact. It was a compromise he was more than happy to make.”

— Louise Penny

126. “The madness of crowds was a terrible thing to see. The madness of police with clubs and guns was even worse.”

— Louise Penny

127. “Most people want to be led. But suppose they choose the wrong leader? They end up with the Donner party.”

— Louise Penny

128. “The near enemy. It’s a psychological concept. Two emotions that look the same but are actually opposites. The one parades as the other, is mistaken for the other, but one is healthy and the other’s sick, twisted.”

— Louise Penny

129. “All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it.”

— Louise Penny

130. “You can tell a lot about a man by his friends, or lack of them.”

— Louise Penny

131. “The women in the room chatted about love, about childhood, about losing parents, about Mr. Spock, about good books they’d read. They mothered each other.”

— Louise Penny

132. “Grief was dagger-shaped and sharp and pointed inward. It was made of fresh loss and old sorrow. Rendered and forged and sometimes polished. Irene Finney had taken her daughter’s death and to that sorrow she’d added a long life of entitlement and disappointment, of privilege and pride. And the dagger she’d fashioned was taking a brief break from slashing her insides, and was now pointed outward.”

— Louise Penny

133. “Though dour and childless himself, the grocer was unfailingly kind and patient with children. As though instead of having none, he had them all.”

— Louise Penny

134. “Sobriety isn’t for cowards, Chief Inspector. Whatever you might think of an alcoholic, to get sober, really sober demands great honesty, and that demands great courage. Stopping drinking’s the easy part. Then we have to face ourselves. Our demons. How many people are willing to do that?”

— Louise Penny

135. “Annie laughed. She had a face, a body, made not for a Paris runway but for good meals and books by the fire and laughter. She was constructed from, and for, happiness. But it had taken Annie Gamache a long while to find it. To trust it.”

— Louise Penny

136. “In the kitchen Gamache’s German shepherd, Henri, sat up in his bed and cocked his head. He had huge oversized ears which made Gamache think he wasn’t purebred but a cross between a shepherd and a satellite dish.”

— Louise Penny

137. “They’re kind. Content. They don’t judge. They don’t hide their feelings. There’s no hidden agenda. Complete acceptance. If that isn’t grace, I don’t know what is. I’m not saying people with Down syndrome are perfect or always easy. That would be to trivialize them, make them sound like pets. What I am saying is that in my experience they make better humans than most.” He smiled again. “Than me. And I think that’s worth fighting for, don’t you?”

— Louise Penny

138. “Thus human courts acquit the strong, And doom the weak, as therefore wrong.”

— Louise Penny

139. “I had three chairs in my house: one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.” “My favorite quote from Thoreau is also from Walden,” said Gamache. “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.”

— Louise Penny

140. “She’d taught him that order was freedom. To live in chaos was to live in a prison. Order freed the mind for other things.”

— Louise Penny

141. “Three Pines is a state of mind. When we choose tolerance over hate. Kindness over cruelty. Goodness over bullying. When we choose to be hopeful, not cynical. Then we live in Three Pines.”

— Louise Penny

142. “Peter Morrow took no risks. He neither failed nor succeeded. There were no valleys, but neither were there mountains. Peter’s landscape was flat. An endless, predictable desert.”

— Louise Penny

143. “A mind with absolutely no insight into itself, a mind filled with purpose and delusion.”

— Louise Penny

144. “You’re catastrophizing, allowing fear into the driver’s seat. You’re reacting to things that haven’t happened and behaving as though they have, or are inevitable. Focus on what is actually happening, here and now.” “Surrender to reality,” he said with a small grin and, grabbing a tissue, he rubbed his eyes. It was one of Hardye Moel’s favorite sayings. “Yes. Stop fighting battles that don’t exist. Focus on what does.”

— Louise Penny

145. “Young Langlois had sat down and gathered that power to him. The power that came from having information, knowledge, thoughts, and a calm place to collect them.”

— Louise Penny

146. “A journalist also needs to be disciplined, and so do I. I am, essentially, lazy. Without discipline I’d be just a mass of gummy bears on the sofa instead of on book tour with my eighth novel.”

— Louise Penny

147. “But Beauvoir could feel what Ruth was sensing. Something was radiating off Gamache. Was it rage he felt from the chief? Jean-Guy wondered. It certainly wasn’t fear. It was actually, Beauvoir realized with some surprise, extreme calm.”

— Louise Penny

148. “We’re used to the film versions of psychopaths. The clearly crazies. But most psychopaths are clever. They have to be. They know how to mimic human behavior. How to pretend to care, while not actually feeling anything except perhaps rage and an overwhelming and near-perpetual sense of entitlement. That they’ve been wronged. They get what they want mostly through manipulation.”

— Louise Penny

149. “We were both wrong. You were afraid to stop and I was afraid to go.” “You think we’ll have less fear tomorrow?” he asked. “Not less fear,” she said. “But perhaps more courage.”

— Louise Penny

150. “Nature, she knew, abhorred a vacuum, and these people, faced with an information vacuum, had filled it with their fears.”

— Louise Penny