Quotes from Louise Penny

Had he not been a cop, he'd have loved to be a historian or archivist. Going over old papers, finding curiosities buried in obscure libraries.

put it there. He makes us better men and better monks. He believes in God and he believes in the power of love and forgiveness. And not just a faith of convenience.

I was miserable and making everyone around me miserable.

they were originally made from the metal remains of the first Québec Bridge. It collapsed in 1907, killing eighty-six workers. It was a catastrophic failure of engineering. The rings were made to remind engineers of that disaster, and the consequences of what they, what we, do.

order was freedom. To live in chaos was to live in a prison. Order freed the mind for other things.

It is the chiefest point of happiness, she scribbled quickly, before the Commander could see, that a man is willing to be what he is." Chapter 6 · Page 53 · Location 957

That night, after Vespers, this nameless monk sat by precious candle-light, staring at the psalms written so carefully on the vellum. Then he dipped his quill in ink and drew the very first musical note.

Homes, Gamache knew, were a self-portrait. A person's choice of color, furnishing, pictures. Every touch revealed the individual. God, or the Devil, was in the details. And so was the human. Was it dirty, messy, obsessively clean? Were the decorations chosen to impress, or were they a hodgepodge of personal history? Was the space cluttered or clear? He felt a thrill every time he entered a home during an investigation.

She lived, it seemed, at the place where the river Styx narrowed.

Despond not, though times be bale, And baleful be, Though winds blow stout –

One was grey, the other black. The gray one wanted his grandfather to be corageous, and patient, and kind. The other, the black one, wanted his grandfather to be fearful and cruel. this upset the boy and he thought aboutit for a few days the returned to his grandfather. He asked, "Grandfather, which of the wolves will win?" ... "The one I feed

Gregorian chant was the father of western music. But it was eventually killed by its ungrateful children. Buried. Lost and forgotten.

au lait. "We all

Above them, a riot of stars formed horses and birds and magical creatures." Chapter 9 · Page 80 · Location 1434

Documents were destroyed. The archives themselves were in a shocking state after the war. They'd been ransacked by the Nazis, who burned anything that contradicted their worldview. We lost countless irreplaceable manuscripts. For instance, their insistence on an Aryan race. We had document after document proving there's no such thing. It was a construct, a myth, created hundreds of years ago and resurrected by the Nazis.

from W. H. Auden: "Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.

An old pagan ritual from a time when pagan meant peasant and peasant meant worker and being a worker was a significant thing,' said Myrna. Agent

The bishop-that-burneth.

This's the Admiral's Suite? There must be a mistake," said Chartrand, trying to turn around without getting engaged to either man.

But the woman he knew and loved had been swallowed up. Like Jonah. Her white whale of sorrow and loss in an ocean of body fluid.

he walked back home, pausing to marvel at the stars. Many of which no longer existed. Just their light." Chapter 10 · Page 87 · Location 1533

Besides, while Gamache wanted very much to solve the crime, he didn't want to lose his soul in the process. He suspected there were enough lost souls already.

Al's mouth formed the beginning of a word. Why, perhaps. Or, what. But it died there. And Gamache saw Laurent's father pack up his home, take all his possessions, and move. To that other world. Where nine-year-old boys were killed. A world where nine-year-old boys were murdered. Armand Gamache was the moving man, the ferryman, who took him there. And once across there was no going back.

He'd once heard a judge say the most humane way to execute a prisoner was to tell him he was free. Then kill him. Gamache had struggled against that, argued against it, railed against it. Then finally, exhausted, had come to believe it.