Top 450 Louise Penny Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “After spending most of her life scanning the horizon for slights and threats, genuine and imagined, she knew the real threat to her happiness came not from the dot in the distance, but from looking for it. Expecting it. Waiting for it. And in some cases, creating it. Her.”

— Louise Penny

152. “Chief Inspector Gamache knew one thing about hate. It bound you forever to the person you hated. Murder wasn’t committed out of hate, it was done as a terrible act of freedom. To finally rid yourself of the burden.”

— Louise Penny

153. “He tried to let her know it would be all right. Eventually. Life wouldn’t always be this painful. The world wouldn’t always be this brutal. Give it time, little one. Give it another chance. Come back.”

— Louise Penny

154. “All the mistakes I’ve made have been because I’ve assumed something and then acted as though it was fact. Very dangerous, Agent Lemieux. Believe me. I wonder if you haven’t already leaped to a false conclusion?”

— Louise Penny

155. “The funny thing about murder is that the act is often committed decades before the actual action. Something happens, and it leads, inexorably, to death many years later. A bad seed is planted. It’s like those old horror films from the Hammer studios, of the monster, not running, never running, but walking without pause, without thought or mercy, toward its victim. Murder is often like that. It starts way far off.”

— Louise Penny

156. “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

157. “His heart filled his chest and ran to the end of his tail and the very tips of his considerable ears. It filled his head, squeezing out his brain. But Henri, the foundling, was a humanist, and while not particularly clever was the smartest creature Gamache knew. Everything he knew he knew by heart.”

— Louise Penny

158. “Henri kept everything important in his heart. He mostly kept cookies in his head.”

— Louise Penny

159. “I turned down all the requests for the rights to the books, for years, mostly because they wanted the rights to the characters, and to turn it into a TV series. This would have allowed them to do anything they wanted with the characters, and that just wasn’t an option for me.”

— Louise Penny

160. “The banality of evil. It wasn’t the frothing madman. It was the conscientious us.”

— Louise Penny

161. “He knew, as a man used to fear, the great danger of letting it take control. It distorted reality. Consumed reality. Fear created its own reality.”

— Louise Penny

162. “Holy horrible taste, Batman.”

— Louise Penny

163. “Hurt feelings,” said Lacoste. “I’d rather have a bruise any day.”

— Louise Penny

164. “Don’t get me wrong, I believe in using your head, but not in spending too much time in there. Fear lives in the head, and courage lives in the heart. The job is to get from one to the other.”

— Louise Penny

165. “I’m just like this. I have no talent for choosing my battles. Life seems, strangely, like a battle to me. The whole thing.”

— Louise Penny

166. “That was why she was happy. He now knew that happiness and kindness went together. There was not one without the other.”

— Louise Penny

167. “I’ll put my faith in individuals, not the collective.”

— Louise Penny

168. “What I was going to say is that my mentor had this theory that our lives are like an aboriginal longhouse. Just one huge room.” He swept one arm out to illustrate scope. “He said that if we thought we could compartmentalize things, we were deluding ourselves. Everyone we meet, every word we speak, every action taken or not taken lives in our longhouse. With us. Always. Never to be expelled or locked away.”

— Louise Penny

169. “But correct and right were two different things. As were facts and truth.”

— Louise Penny

170. “As the boys screamed and hauled off handfuls of mulch, Olivier had slowly, deliberately, gently taken Gabri’s hand and held it before gracefully lifting it to his lips. The boys had watched, momentarily stunned, as Olivier had kissed Gabri’s manure-stained hand with his manure-stained lips. The boys had seemed petrified by this act of love and defiance. But just for a moment. Their hatred triumphed and soon their attack had re-doubled.”

— Louise Penny

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

— Louise Penny

172. “There seems such a fine line between falling into place and falling apart.”

— Louise Penny

173. “She suspected if they looked in Gamache’s bedside table, they’d find all sorts of lost souls he put there for safekeeping. And maybe a baguette.”

— Louise Penny

174. “Alcohol stole dignity and friends and family and livelihoods before finally taking the life. Alcohol was a thief. And often a murderer.”

— Louise Penny

175. “Homes, Gamache knew, were a self portrait. A person’s choice of color, furnishing, pictures, every touch revealed the individual. God, or the devil, was in the details. And so was the human. Was it dirty, messy, obsessively clean? Were the decorations chosen to impress, or were they a hodgepodge of personal history? Was the space cluttered or clear? He felt a thrill every time he entered a home during an investigation.”

— Louise Penny

176. “It was like archeology. There was digging and there was dirt. And there was broken things.”

— Louise Penny

177. “He listened to people, took notes, gathered evidence, like all his colleagues. But he did one more thing. He gathered feelings. He collected emotions. Because murder was deeply human.”

— Louise Penny

178. “And now you see why lies matter. The actual fib might not matter, but what it shows us is that what you say can’t always be trusted. You can’t always be trusted.”

— Louise Penny

179. “And this was what a couple of that age looked like. If they were lucky.”

— Louise Penny

180. “Some mothers see their job as preparing their kids to live in the big old world. To be independent, to marry and have children of their own. To live wherever they choose and do what makes them happy. That’s love. Others, and we all see them, cling to their children. Move to the same city, the same neighborhood. Live through them. Stifle them. Manipulate, use guilt-trips, cripple them.’ ‘Cripple them? How?’ ‘By not teaching them to be independent.”

— Louise Penny

181. “The reason Armand Gamache could go there was because it wasn’t totally foreign to him. He knew it because he’d seen his own burned terrain, he’d walked off the familiar and comfortable path inside his own head and heart and seen what festered in the dark. And one day Jean Guy Beauvoir would look at his own monsters, and then be able to recognize others. And maybe this was the day and this was the case. He hoped so.”

— Louise Penny

182. “Myrna could spend happy hours browsing bookcases. She felt if she could just get a good look at a person’s bookcase and their grocery cart, she’d pretty much know who they were.”

— Louise Penny

183. “He felt like a mobile library. Where other investigators gathered fingerprints and evidence, he gathered books.”

— Louise Penny

184. “Jesus, is Gamache hiring fetuses now?”

— Louise Penny

185. “His theory is that life is loss,’ said Myrna after a moment. ‘Loss of parents, loss of loves, loss of jobs. So we have to find a higher meaning in our lives than these things and people. Otherwise we’ll lose ourselves.”

— Louise Penny

186. “There are generally three parties to child abuse: the abused, the abuser and the bystander.”

— Louise Penny

187. “There’s a theory,” said Myrna. “Not sure if it’s Buddhist or Taoist or what, that says that there are certain people we meet time and again, in different lifetimes.”

— Louise Penny

188. “Kebek. An Algonquin word. Where the river narrows.”

— Louise Penny

189. “Hope itself wasn’t necessarily kind. Or a good thing.”

— Louise Penny

190. “Myrna... prayed God wasn’t one of of the men or women she’d betrayed by signing their release. Myrna’s weight wasn’t all carried around her middle.”

— Louise Penny

191. “Waiting for someone to save them. Expecting someone to save them or at least protect them from the big, bad world. The thing is no one else can save them because the problem is theirs and so is the solution. Only they can get out of it.”

— Louise Penny

192. “Winning doesn’t mean my book is better than anyone else’s. It means I’m very fortunate. And I should be very, very aware of that. And grateful.”

— Louise Penny

193. “How often we made our worst fears come true, by behaving as though they already were.”

— Louise Penny

194. “Every decade of my life I attempted to write a novel. But I had nothing to say. I was far too self-absorbed, and now I realize I was writing for others, so that they’d applaud me, see my genius, tell me how wonderful I am, or be jealous of my success.”

— Louise Penny

195. “Not everyone’s an explorer, and not every explorer makes it back alive. That’s why it takes so much courage.”

— Louise Penny

196. “Most of the people came through my door because of a crisis in their lives, and most of those crises boiled down to loss. Loss of a marriage or an important relationship. Loss of security. A job, a home, a parent. Something drove them to ask for help and to look deep inside themselves. And the catalyst was often change and loss.”

— Louise Penny

197. “Abbots and priors and monks, oh my.”

— Louise Penny

198. “There is always a road back. If we have the courage to look for it, and take it. I’m sorry. I was wrong. I don’t know. I need help. These are the signposts. The cardinal directions.”

— Louise Penny

199. “We choose our thoughts. We choose our perceptions. We choose our attitudes. We may not think so. We may not believe it, but we do. I absolutely know we do. I’ve seen enough evidence, time after time, tragedy after tragedy. Triumph after triumph. It’s about choice.”

— Louise Penny

200. “There’s no wrong answer. Just the truth.”

— Louise Penny