Louise Penny Quotes

Most of us are great with change, as long as it was our idea.

Her tragedy was that she always found men to save her. She never had to save herself. She never knew she could.

Where other women ... were lovely, Annie Gamache was alive.
Late, too late, Jean Guy Beauvoir had come to appreciate how very important it was, how very attractive it was, how very rare it was, to be fully alive.

Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table,

The women in the room chatted about love, about childhood, about losing parents, about Mr. Spock, about good books they'd read.

They mothered each other.

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.

Wait, Armand, he heard behind him but kept walking, ignoring the calls. Then he remembered what Emile had meant to him and still did. Did this one bad thing wipe everything else out?

That was the danger. Not that betrayals happened, not that cruel things happened, but that they could outweigh all the good. That we could forget the good and only remember the bad.

But not today. Gamache stopped.

She wasn’t afraid to be wrong. And that, the Chief knew, was a great strength.

Every year the hunters shot cows and horses and family pets and each other. And unbelievably, they sometimes shot themselves, perhaps in a psychotic episode where they mistook themselves for dinner

...it was vital to be aware of actions in the present. Because the present became the past, and the past grew. And got up, and followed you.

Is it true? Is it kind? Does it need to be said?

"You too?" She asked Ruth. "How do your poems start out?"

"They start as a lump in the throat," she said.

the four statements that lead to wisdom: I don’t know. I need help. I was wrong. I’m sorry.

I’ll pray that you grow up a brave man in a brave country. I will pray you find a way to be useful.

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.