Top 450 Louise Penny Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Louise Penny

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

— Louise Penny

204. “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

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

— Louise Penny

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

— Louise Penny

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

— Louise Penny

208. “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

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

— Louise Penny

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

— Louise Penny

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

— Louise Penny

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

215. “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

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

— Louise Penny

217. “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

218. “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

219. “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

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

— Louise Penny

221. “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

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

— Louise Penny

223. “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

224. “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

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

— Louise Penny

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

— Louise Penny

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

— Louise Penny

228. “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

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

— Louise Penny

230. “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

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

— Louise Penny

232. “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

233. “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

234. “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

235. “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

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

— Louise Penny

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

— Louise Penny

238. “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

239. “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

240. “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

241. “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

242. “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

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

— Louise Penny

244. “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

245. “Gamache enjoyed going to churches for their music and the beauty of the language and the stillness. But he felt closer to God in his Volvo.”

— 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. “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

248. “And I would never, ever mock the power of love. But it can also distort. Slip over into desperation and delusion.”

— Louise Penny

249. “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

250. “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