Top 450 Louise Penny Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “As far as the official mapmakers were concerned Three Pines didn’t exist. It had never been surveyed. Never plotted. No GPS or sat nav system, no matter how sophisticated, would ever find the little village. It only appeared as though by accident over the edge of the hill. Suddenly. It could not be found unless you were lost.”

— Louise Penny

252. “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

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

— Louise Penny

254. “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

255. “If love was compass enough, said Armand quietly, there would be no missing children.”

— Louise Penny

256. “While Henri had a huge heart, he had quite a modest brain. His head was taken up almost entirely by his ears. In fact, his head seemed simply a sort of mount for those ears. Fortunately Henri didn’t really need his head. He kept all the important things in his heart.”

— Louise Penny

257. “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

258. “When I miss things or let them pass they gather in a heap then rise up and take a life. So, I try not to.”

— Louise Penny

259. “Like the street his gallery was on, Fortin had an attractive front, hiding quite a foul interior. He was opportunistic. He fed on the talent of others. Got rich on the talent of others. While most of the artists themselves barely scraped by, and took all the risks.”

— Louise Penny

260. “What people do for power. How they’re willing to mutilate themselves, physically, intellectually, morally, for power and position.”

— Louise Penny

261. “There is always a road back. If we have the courage to look for it, and take it.”

— Louise Penny

262. “It was like walking into joy.”

— Louise Penny

263. “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

264. “Happy people didn’t drink themselves to sleep every night.”

— Louise Penny

265. “Irene Finney, like many very elderly people, knew that the world was indeed flat. It had a beginning and an end. And she had come to the edge.”

— Louise Penny

266. “Rumors are hard to prove, but they’re even harder to disprove. We both know that character assassination is easy. All it takes is a suggestion. A well-placed word in someone’s ear.”

— Louise Penny

267. “In time, it wasn’t all that long ago, but measured in events, it was an eternity.”

— Louise Penny

268. “As they trudged through the snow toward Clara’s pretty little cottage, Ruth lost her footing. Haniya grabbed her before she fell. She held Ruth’s hand for the rest of the way, and wondered if maybe the key was not in being held, but in holding.”

— Louise Penny

269. “Each day they tracked down killers. Each day they put their own lives on the line. And in return they were scapegoated. Chained to the ground, food for politicians looking for reelection.”

— Louise Penny

270. “Not everything needed to be brought into the light, he knew. Not every truth needed to be told.”

— Louise Penny

271. “Three craggy pine trees had stood at the far end of the green for as long as anyone remembered, like wise men who’d found what they were looking for.”

— Louise Penny

272. “Tea lights were lit and placed on the table and around the garden, so that it looked like large fireflies had settled in for the evening.”

— Louise Penny

273. “The Chief had once told him about the behavior of gorillas when faced with an attack. They met it head on, staring down the enemy. But every now and then they’d reach out to touch the gorilla beside them. To make sure they were not alone. Keeping his eyes on the road, Jean-Guy reached out and touched Gamache’s shoulder.”

— Louise Penny

274. “You do know that the earth is round.” “The earth might be, but human nature isn’t. It has caverns and abysses and all sorts of traps.”

— Louise Penny

275. “They don’t teach this at medical school, but I’ve seen it in real life. People dying in bits and pieces. A series of petites morts. Little deaths. They lose their sight, their hearing, their independence. Those are the physical ones. But there’re others. Less obvious, but more fatal. They lose heart. They lose hope. They lose faith. They lose interest. And finally, they lose themselves.”

— Louise Penny

276. “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

277. “Once again the fate of reckless youth was being decided by old men behind closed doors.”

— Louise Penny

278. “Hell is the truth seen too late,” said Reine-Marie as she poured out more coffee. “Thomas Hobbes.”

— Louise Penny

279. “And yet,’ Gamache continued in a pleasant voice, ’isn’t that what’s often taught in meditation? Not the absence of emotion, or swallowing them, but not allowing them to run the show?”

— Louise Penny

280. “Far greater than Gamache’s anger was his caring.”

— Louise Penny

281. “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

282. “It was one thing to forgive, it was another to climb back into the cage with that bear, even if it was wearing a tutu and smiling.”

— Louise Penny

283. “The fault is here, but so is the solution. That’s the grace.”

— Louise Penny

284. “What killed people wasn’t a bullet, a blade, a fist to the face. What killed people was a feeling. Left too long. Sometimes in the cold, frozen. Sometimes buried and fetid. And sometimes on the shores of a lake, isolated. Left to grow old, and odd.”

— Louise Penny

285. “Everyday for Lucy’s entire dog life Jane had sliced a banana for breakfast and had miraculously dropped one of the perfect disks on to the floor where it sat for an instant before being gobbled up. Every morning Lucy’s prayers were answered, confirming her belief that God was old and clumsy and smelt like roses and lived in the kitchen. But no more. Lucy knew her God was dead. And she now knew the miracle wasn’t the banana, it was the hand that offered the banana.”

— Louise Penny

286. “Be careful. You’re making hurting a habit. Spreading it around won’t lessen your pain, you know. Just the opposite.”

— Louise Penny

287. “Their lives could not be defined by their deaths. They belonged not in perpetual pain but in the beauty of their short lives.”

— Louise Penny

288. “He now knew that happiness and kindness went together.”

— Louise Penny

289. “People instinctively let down their guard when they saw a limp, an illness, a flaw in someone else. Not out of compassion but because it made them feel superior. Stronger. Those people, Gamache knew, did not always last long. It was not a useful instinct.”

— Louise Penny

290. “Chief Inspector Gamache knew one thing about hate. It bound you forever to the person you hated.”

— Louise Penny

291. “I think you might try leading your life as though it’s just you. If he comes back and you know your life will be better with him, then great. But you’ll also know you’re enough on your own.”

— Louise Penny

292. “There was nothing right or good in dying for your country. A necessity, sometimes, yes. But always a tragedy. Not an aspiration.”

— Louise Penny

293. “Sauve qui peut.”

— Louise Penny

294. “But he was a thirty-nine-year-old black man. He’d been stopped so many times by the cops, he’d stopped counting. They’d had to train their fourteen-year-old son, from the time he could walk, how to behave when stopped by the cops. When harassed. When targeted. When pushed and provoked. Don’t react. Move slowly. Show your hands. Be polite, do as you’re asked. Don’t react.”

— Louise Penny

295. “Go now to your dwelling place to enter into the days of your togetherness. And may your days be good and long upon the earth.”

— Louise Penny

296. “Olivier looked at him blankly. But the Chief Inspector had seen that look before. It was, in fact, almost impossible to look blank. Unless the person wanted to. A blank face to the Chief Inspector meant a frantic mind.”

— Louise Penny

297. “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. And he went into the dark, hidden rooms in the minds of others. The minds of killers. And he faced down whatever monsters came at him. He went to places Beauvoir had never even dreamed existed.”

— Louise Penny

298. “But sometimes that comfort was an illusion. Masquerading as protecting, while actually imprisoning.”

— Louise Penny

299. “Before laptops and BlackBerries and all the other tools that mistook information for knowledge. It was an old library, filled with old books and dusty old thoughts.”

— Louise Penny

300. “In my teens my drug of choice was acceptance, in my twenties it was approval, in my thirties it was love, in my forties it was Scotch. That lasted a while,’ she admitted. ‘Now all I really crave is a good bowel movement.”

— Louise Penny