Top 450 Louise Penny Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

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

— Louise Penny

153. “But being essentially a dumpster fire herself, she was familiar with flames.”

— Louise Penny

154. “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

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

— Louise Penny

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

— Louise Penny

157. “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

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

— Louise Penny

159. “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

160. “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

161. “You can’t get milk from a hardware store. So stop asking for something that can’t be given. And look for what is offered. She saw the fork of food, and the thin lips that rarely smiled at them, blowing on it.”

— Louise Penny

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

— Louise Penny

163. “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

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

— Louise Penny

165. “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

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

— Louise Penny

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

— Louise Penny

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

— Louise Penny

169. “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

170. “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

171. “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

172. “I’m sorry.’ ‘I was wrong.’ ‘I don’t know.’” As he listed them, Chief Inspector Gamache raised a finger, until his palm was open. “’I need help.”

— Louise Penny

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

— Louise Penny

174. “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

175. “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

176. “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

177. “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

178. “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

179. “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

180. “Consequences,” said Gamache. “We must always consider the consequences of our actions. Or inaction. It won’t necessarily change what we do, but we need to be aware of the effect.”

— Louise Penny

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

— Louise Penny

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

— Louise Penny

183. “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

184. “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

185. “Holy horrible taste, Batman.”

— Louise Penny

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

— Louise Penny

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

— Louise Penny

188. “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

189. “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

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

— Louise Penny

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

— Louise Penny

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

— Louise Penny

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

— Louise Penny

194. “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

195. “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

196. “He read the familiar first lines of the book and felt the calm come over him, like a comforter.”

— Louise Penny

197. “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

198. “I asked him to leave because he stopped caring for me, stopped supporting me. Not because I’d stopped caring for him.”

— Louise Penny

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

— Louise Penny

200. “A will, an estate, could become about more than money, property, possessions. Who was left the most could be interpreted as who was loved the most. There were different sorts of greed. Of need.”

— Louise Penny