Top 450 Louise Penny Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “If you pretend to know you aren’t going to actually learn.”

— Louise Penny

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

— Louise Penny

103. “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

104. “The memory of the heart was far stronger than whatever was kept in the mind. The question was, what did people keep in their heart?”

— Louise Penny

105. “Kindness beats cruelty.”

— Louise Penny

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

— Louise Penny

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

— Louise Penny

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

— Louise Penny

109. “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

110. “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

111. “Knowledge, ideas, thoughts. Imagination. All invisible. All lived in libraries.”

— Louise Penny

112. “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

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

— Louise Penny

114. “Our secrets make us sick because they separate us from other people. Keep us alone. Turn us into fearful, angry, bitter people. Turn us against others, and finally against ourselves. A murder almost always began with a secret. Murder was a secret spread over time. Gamache.”

— Louise Penny

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

— Louise Penny

116. “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

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

— Louise Penny

118. “C. S. Lewis wrote that we can create situations in which we are happy, but we cannot create joy. It just happens.”

— Louise Penny

119. “You can tell a lot about a man by his friends, or lack of them. Do they bring out the best in each other, or are they always gossiping, tearing others down? Keeping wounds alive?”

— Louise Penny

120. “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

121. “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

122. “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

123. “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

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

— Louise Penny

125. “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

126. “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

127. “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

128. “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

129. “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

130. “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

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

— Louise Penny

132. “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

133. “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

134. “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

135. “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

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

— Louise Penny

137. “This village has known loss, people killed before their time, accidents, war, disease. Three Pines isn’t immune to any of that. But you seem to accept it as part of life and not hang on to the bitterness.”

— Louise Penny

138. “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

139. “But he’d come to agree with Sister Prejean that no one was as bad as the worst thing they’d done. Armand Gamache had seen the worst. But he’d also seen the best. Often in the same person.”

— Louise Penny

140. “The lines of his face were the longitude and latitude of his life.”

— Louise Penny

141. “You know Gabri, he wears his heart on his sleeve.’ In fact, there were times Olivier wondered whether Gabri hadn’t been born inside out.”

— Louise Penny

142. “Michael Brebeuf had long hated Armand. But he had loved him even longer.”

— Louise Penny

143. “But she went from being a happy, carefree child to an embittered woman. Very solitary, not very likeable apparently. Then, near the end of her life, she wrote to a friend. In the letter she said that her father had said something to her. Something horrible and unforgivable.” “The brutal telling.”

— Louise Penny

144. “A coy smile could capture him, but it was finally a hearty laugh that had freed him.”

— Louise Penny

145. “The trick wasn’t necessarily having less fear, it was finding more courage.”

— Louise Penny

146. “Her voice was flat, in a way Myrna recognized from years of listening to people trying to rein in their emotions. To squash them down, flatten, them, and with them their words and their voices. Desperately trying to make the horrific sound mundane.”

— Louise Penny

147. “Despite himself, Beauvoir laughed. “There is strong shadow where there is much light.”

— Louise Penny

148. “The glass was old. Leaded. Imperfect. And it was the imperfections that were creating the play of light.”

— Louise Penny

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

— Louise Penny

150. “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, but’ – now her eyes shone and she almost vibrated with excitement – ’the most powerful, spectacular thing is that the solution rests with us as well. We’re the only ones who can change our lives, turn them around. So all those years waiting for someone else to do it are wasted.”

— Louise Penny