Top 450 Louise Penny Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

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

— Louise Penny

204. “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

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

— Louise Penny

206. “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

207. “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

208. “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

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

— Louise Penny

210. “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

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

— Louise Penny

212. “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

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

— Louise Penny

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

— Louise Penny

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

— Louise Penny

216. “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

217. “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

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

— Louise Penny

219. “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

220. “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

221. “Evil is unspectacular, and always human, And shares our bed and eats at our own table, And we are introduced to Goodness every day. Even in drawing rooms, among a crowd of faults.”

— Louise Penny

222. “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

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

— Louise Penny

224. “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

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

— Louise Penny

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

— Louise Penny

227. “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

228. “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

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

— Louise Penny

230. “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

231. “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

232. “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

233. “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

234. “It wasn’t really, he knew, about less fear. It was about more courage.”

— Louise Penny

235. “If ever two men were made for cahoots, it was these two. They were cahootites.”

— Louise Penny

236. “If kind acts could protect us from tragedy, thought Lacoste, the world would be a kinder place.”

— Louise Penny

237. “Beauvoir knew that almost everyone did four things, when faced with modern technology. First they created passwords. Then they forgot them. Then, on being forced to create new ones, they simplified and went with only one, which opened everything. And then they wrote it down. And hid that paper somewhere. That way they only had to remember the place, not the password.”

— Louise Penny

238. “At this discovery Matthew Croft’s legs gave way and he sank to the cold concrete floor, to a place no rhyming verse existed. He had finally been hurt beyond poetry.”

— Louise Penny

239. “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

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

— Louise Penny

241. “It was funny how obsessed people believed others equally obsessed, or even interested.”

— Louise Penny

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

— Louise Penny

243. “The Chief believed if you sift through evil, at the very bottom you’ll find good. He believed that evil has its limits. Beauvoir didn’t. He believed that if you sift through good, you’ll find evil. Without borders, without brakes, without limit.”

— Louise Penny

244. “These are dangerous times and dangerous people. We need all the help we can get.”

— Louise Penny

245. “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

246. “Yes, I do. The ones who aren’t growing and evolving, who are standing still. They’re the ones who rarely got better.’ ‘Yes, that was it,’ said Gamache. ‘They waited for life to happen to them. They waited for someone to save them. Or heal them. They did nothing for themselves.’ ‘Ben,’ said Peter.”

— Louise Penny

247. “She picked up her book and tried to read but it was heavy in her hands. She struggled to hold it, wanting to finish the story, wanting to know how it ended. She was afraid she’d run out of time before she ran out of book.”

— Louise Penny

248. “No. It was almost impossible to electrocute someone these days, unless you were the governor of Texas.”

— Louise Penny

249. “She knew how the Chief Inspector preferred decorum at the site of a murder, especially in the presence of the corpse. It was rare. Most murder scenes were filled with smart-ass and often gruesome comments, made by men and women frightened by what they saw, and believing sarcasm and rude remarks kept the monsters at bay. They didn’t.”

— Louise Penny

250. “He was like an addict before a fix. Book freaks are like that, and not just old guys. Look at kids lining up for the latest installment of their favorite books. Stories, they’re addictive.” Gamache.”

— Louise Penny