Quotes from Louise Penny

Bang. You're dead.' Gamache swung around, but had recognised the voice an instant after he'd begun to turn. 'You're a sneak, Jean Guy. I'm going to have to put a cow bell on you.' 'Not again.' It wasn't often he could get the drop on the chief. But Beauvoir had begun to worry. Suppose he snuck up on Gamache sometime and he had a heart attack? It would certainly take the fun out of it.

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

The banality of evil. It wasn't the frothing madman. It was the conscientious us.

It's good to be reminded now and then that such things exist." "What things?" "Beauty. Peace." She held his eyes. "Goodness. But they're fragile and can so easily disappear, unless people are willing to do what's necessary to defend them.

Peter Morrow took no risks. He neither failed nor succeeded. There were no valleys, but neither were there mountains. Peter's landscape was flat. An endless, predictable desert.

April in Québec was a climatological shitstorm. A mindfuck of epic proportions.

The fault lies with us, and only us. It's not fate, not genetics, not bad luck, and it's definitely not Mom and Dad. Ultimately it's us and our choices...but the most powerful spectacular thing is that the solution rests with us as well.

Do no harm was part of Hippocrates's writing, but from a different text. On epidemics.

You have one hour to live. Who is it, exactly, you have needed all these years to forgive?" Myrna

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.

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.

I know how precious life is. You had no right to take Renaud's and you have no right to take your own now. Not over this. Too much death. It needs to stop.

I always think a case is like driving from here to the Gaspé. A great long distance and I can't see the end. But I don't have to. All I have to do is keep throwing light in front of me, and follow the headlights. Eventually I'll get there.

No. The real danger in a garden came from the bindweed. That moved underground, then surfaced and took hold. Strangling plant after healthy plant. Killing them all, slowly. And for no apparent reason, except that it was its nature. And then it disappeared underground again.

Thus human courts acquit the strong, And doom the weak, as therefore wrong.

The sofa always reminded him of the Monty Python sketch when a man, about to be tortured in the Inquisition, was threatened with the "comfy chair." Dear God, he thought, not the sofa. It was an unexpected, certainly unintended, torture, though Clara didn't seem to see it. The springs had long since let go, so that you either hit the concrete floor or, worse, a spring. He hovered over it for a moment, then, like a cliff diver, he committed.

The very force of his personality both created and crippled. How much more could he have accomplished had he been kinder? But then, dynamism and kindness often don't go together…

while men and women perished, and cities fell, symbols endured, grew. Symbols were immortal.

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

by parents who tried to pretend their progeny weren't one jelly bean away from Lord of the Flies.

Shakespeare: …the best way to peace is to have a still and quiet conscience. Or none at all, thought Gamache.

A murder was never about brawn, it began and ended in the brain and the brain could justify anything.

Anyone so damaged as to cause this much harm led a life full of secrets and full of enemies.

Despite himself, Beauvoir laughed. "There is strong shadow where there is much light.