Top 450 Louise Penny Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “But he also knew praying was more to steady the person than inform the deity.”

— Louise Penny

352. “He often said that words told them what someone was thinking, but the tone told them how they felt.”

— Louise Penny

353. “Why were there no words that felt? Words that when you touched them you’d feel what was intended? The chasm left by the loss of Madeleine? The lump in the throat that fizzed and ached. The terror of falling asleep knowing that on waking she’d relive the loss, like Prometheus bound and tormented each day. Everything had changed. Even her grammar. Suddenly she lived in the past tense. And the singular.”

— Louise Penny

354. “That’s what I believe,” said Ruth. “Peter didn’t. Here was a man who was given everything. Talent, love, a peaceful place to live and create. And all he had to do was appreciate it.” “And if he didn’t?” “He would remain stone. And the deities would turn on him. They do, you know. They’re generous, but they demand gratitude.”

— Louise Penny

355. “Gamache had been to Three Pines on previous investigations and each time he’d had the feeling he belonged. It was a powerful feeling. After all, what else did people really want except to belong? He.”

— Louise Penny

356. “Armand Gamache had seen the worst. But he’d also seen the best. Often in the same person.”

— Louise Penny

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

— Louise Penny

358. “She threw great logs of ‘I’m right, you’re an unfeeling bastard’ on to the fire and felt secure and comforted.”

— Louise Penny

359. “In winter the very ground seemed to reach up and grab the elderly, yanking them to earth as though hungry for them.”

— Louise Penny

360. “Dear God, thought Gamache, save me from a huffy priest.”

— Louise Penny

361. “He inhaled deeply and exhaled the word “people.” Not so much an indictment as in wonderment. That there could be so much deliberate cruelty and so much kindness in one species.”

— Louise Penny

362. “Entitlement was, she knew, a terrible thing. It chained the person to their victimhood. It gobbled up all the air around it. Until the person lived in a vacuum, where nothing good could flourish. And the tragedy was almost always compounded, Myrna knew. These people invariably passed it on from generation to generation. Magnified each time. The sore point became their family legend, their myth, their legacy. What they lost became their most prized possession. Their inheritance.”

— Louise Penny

363. “I don’t know. I was wrong. I’m sorry.” Lacoste recited them slowly, lifting a finger to count them off. “I need help,” the Chief said, completing the statements. The ones he’d taught young Agent Lacoste many years ago. The ones he’d recited to all his new agents.”

— Louise Penny

364. “It was, he knew, a sign of End of Days. Ruth refusing booze.”

— Louise Penny

365. “If less was more, she had a great deal.”

— Louise Penny

366. “They kill. To feel safe. It almost never worked.”

— Louise Penny

367. “Ruth believed in precycling. An evolution on recycling. She made use of things before people threw them out.”

— Louise Penny

368. “Do you know why we’re all happy here, monsieur? Because it’s the last house on the road.”

— Louise Penny

369. “Ruth whacked the seat beside her on the sofa, in what could only be interpreted as an invitation. It was like receiving a personalized Molotov cocktail. Gamache.”

— Louise Penny

370. “And she now knew the miracle wasn’t the banana, it was the hand that offered the banana.”

— Louise Penny

371. “Aid workers, when handing out food to starving people, quickly learn that the people fighting for it at the front are the people who need it least. It’s the people sitting quietly at the back, too weak to fight, who need it the most. And so too with tragedy.”

— Louise Penny

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

— Louise Penny

373. “Things sometimes fell apart unexpectedly. It was not necessarily a reflection of how much they were valued.”

— Louise Penny

374. “Yes, facts were necessary. But frankly, anyone could be trained to collect a bloodstain or find a hair. Or an affair. Or a bank balance that didn’t balance. But feelings? Only the bravest wandered into that fiery realm.”

— Louise Penny

375. “They were home. He always felt a bit like a snail, but instead of carrying his home on his back, he carried it in his arms.”

— Louise Penny

376. “Four days. And she had two gay sons, a large black mother, a demented poet for a friend and was considering getting a duck. It was not what she’d expected from this visit.”

— Louise Penny

377. “A belief of convenience isn’t much use, is it?”

— Louise Penny

378. “But wouldn’t people, his clients, realize? When there was no actual money in the account?” “How?” “When they asked for it.” “But people don’t,” she said. “They give it to their investment dealer, and at best they cash in the dividends or take the profits. But the capital remains in the account. Weren’t you ever told by your parents never to touch the capital?” “No. I was told not to touch my brother’s bike.”

— Louise Penny

379. “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

380. “A lie was a light. One that grew into a floodlight, that eventually illuminated the person among them with the biggest secret. The most to hide.”

— Louise Penny

381. “This was the great benefit of seeing worse. Fewer things worried him now.”

— Louise Penny

382. “This used to be my drug of choice. 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.”

— Louise Penny

383. “It’s vital to hear your own language, to see it written, to see it valued.”

— Louise Penny

384. “But Annie hates children.” “Well, she’s not very good with them, but I don’t think she hates them. She adores Florence and Zora.” “She has to,” said Beauvoir. “They’re family. She’s probably depending on them, in her old age. She’ll be bitter Auntie Annie, with the stale chocolates and the doorknob collection. And they’ll have to look after her. So she can’t drop them on their heads now.”

— Louise Penny

385. “And now here is my secret, a very simple secret. It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

— Louise Penny

386. “Your brain is your weapon.”

— Louise Penny

387. “This part of rue Ste.-Catherine wasn’t so much an artery as an intestine.”

— Louise Penny

388. “We see it when bullies are in charge. It becomes part of the culture of an institution, a family, an ethnic group, a country. It becomes not just acceptable, but expected. Applauded even.”

— Louise Penny

389. “Their reasons are their own,’ he finally said. ‘I don’t have to care.”

— Louise Penny

390. “But privately Reine-Marie wondered. Wondered whether what people did in a crisis was, in fact, their real selves. Stripped of artifice and social training. It was easy enough to be decent when all was going your way. It was another matter to be decent when all hell was breaking loose.”

— Louise Penny

391. “In winter the very ground seemed to reach up and grab the elderly, yanking them to earth as though hungry for them. Shattering a hip or wrist, or neck. Best to take it slow.”

— Louise Penny

392. “It would be folly to trust the instincts of a baby. But it would also be a mistake to completely dismiss them.”

— Louise Penny

393. “A populist feeding anger and fear is more likely to get elected.”

— Louise Penny

394. “The two women would ‘put up’ the preserves over a couple of days and invariably Marthe would ask, ‘When does a cucumber become a pickle?’ At first he’d tried to answer that question as though she genuinely wanted to know. But over the years he realised there was no answer. At what point does change happen? Sometimes it’s sudden. The ‘ah ha’ moments in our lives, when we suddenly see. But often it’s a gradual change, an evolution.”

— Louise Penny

395. “It smelled of the past, of a time before computers, before information was “Googled” and “blogged.” Before laptops and BlackBerries and all the other tools that mistook information for knowledge.”

— Louise Penny

396. “She’d arrived a self-sufficient city woman, and now she was covered in snow, sitting on a bench beside a crazy person, and she had a duck on her lap. Who was nuts now?”

— Louise Penny

397. “And she knew that that was why drugs were so dangerous. Because they blew the mind. Not the heart. But the mind. And the heart followed. And the soul followed that.”

— Louise Penny

398. “Jews, gypsies, gays. It became normal and acceptable. No one told them what was happening was wrong. In fact, just the opposite.”

— Louise Penny

399. “You need to know this. Everything makes sense. Everything. We just don’t know how yet.”

— Louise Penny

400. “But then, Armand Gamache thought, where else would you find darkness but right up against the light? What greater triumph for evil than to ruin a garden?”

— Louise Penny