Top 450 Louise Penny Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 5 of 10

201. “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

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

— Louise Penny

203. “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

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

— Louise Penny

205. “To be honest, the only thing I ever really wanted to be was a writer – since I read ‘Charlotte’s Web’ as a child.”

— Louise Penny

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

— Louise Penny

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

— Louise Penny

208. “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

209. “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

210. “No,” said Armand. “The outside won’t change, but the inside might. We can but hope.” “We can do more than that, Chief Inspector, if we choose. Hope on its own is rarely enough.”

— Louise Penny

211. “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

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

— Louise Penny

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

— Louise Penny

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

— Louise Penny

215. “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

216. “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

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

— Louise Penny

218. “Below that was the thrum of bumblebees climbing in and over and around the peonies. Getting lost. Bumbling around. It looked comical, ridiculous. But then so much did, unless you knew.”

— Louise Penny

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

— Louise Penny

220. “Memories can kill, Yvette. The past can reach right up and grab you and drag you to a place you shouldn’t be. Like a burning building.”

— Louise Penny

221. “There is a higher court than courts of justice and that is the court of conscience. It supersedes all other courts.”

— Louise Penny

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

— Louise Penny

223. “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

224. “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

225. “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

226. “Not everything buried is actually dead. For many, the past is alive.”

— Louise Penny

227. “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

228. “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

229. “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

230. “Plenty of time for a close friendship to turn to hate. As only a good friendship could. The conduit to the heart was already created.”

— Louise Penny

231. “But he realized Henri already knew all he’d ever need. He knew he was loved and he knew how to love.”

— Louise Penny

232. “Irene Finney filled the void with a child not loved then lost, but first lost, then loved.”

— Louise Penny

233. “She did believe in God. And she believed that Jane was with him. And suddenly her pain and grief became human and natural. And survivable. She had a place to put it, a place where Jane was with God. It was such a relief. She looked.”

— Louise Penny

234. “Unlike most of us, who tend to be transparent, people rarely see through a psychopath,” she continued. “He’s masterful. People trust and believe him. Even like him. It’s his great skill. Convincing people that his point of view is legitimate and right, often when all the evidence points in the other direction. Like Iago. It’s a kind of magic.”

— Louise Penny

235. “Having a friend, Chief Inspector. All you need is one. Makes all the difference.”

— Louise Penny

236. “But Armand always said people react differently to death, and it was folly to judge anyone and double folly to judge what people do when faced with sudden, violent death. Murder. They weren’t themselves.”

— Louise Penny

237. “Gamache was the best of them, the smartest and bravest and strongest because he was willing to go into his own head alone, and open all the doors there, and enter all the dark rooms. And make friends with what he found there.”

— Louise Penny

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

— Louise Penny

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

— Louise Penny

240. “Clara didn’t carry a grudge. They were too heavy and she had too far to go.”

— Louise Penny

241. “What kills can’t be seen, the Chief had warned Beauvoir. That’s what makes it so dangerous. It’s not a gun or a knife or a fist. It’s not anything you can see coming. It’s an emotion. Rancid, spoiled. And waiting for a chance to strike.”

— Louise Penny

242. “First you scare them, then you offer them your false hope. It’s disgusting. But it works. And now the politicians, familiar with the power of fear, have bought your potion wholesale.”

— Louise Penny

243. “The senior council couldn’t allow me to disobey orders and get away with it. This is their punishment. And it’s right. Just as what I did was right.”

— Louise Penny

244. “Fear might stop some people from committing murder, but he knew for certain fear was what drove most people to kill. It was what nested below all the other emotions. It was what twisted and turned the other emotions into something sick. It was an alchemist and could turn daylight into night, joy into despair. Fear, once taken root, blocked the sun. And Gamache knew what grew in that darkness. He searched for it every day.”

— Louise Penny

245. “Haven’t you ever heard of an artist’s muse?” the barman asked. “They all seem to either have one or want one. Me, all I want is peace and quiet.”

— Louise Penny

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

— Louise Penny

247. “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

248. “It’s so easy to get mired in the all too obvious cruelty of the world. It’s natural. But to really heal, we need to recognize the goodness too.”

— Louise Penny

249. “Everything he let go of had claw marks on it.”

— Louise Penny

250. “How many clients had Myrna sat across from as they complained about having been “done wrong”? Whose grip on grievances was so tight it strangled reason. They’d give up sanity before giving up these injustices.”

— Louise Penny