Quotes from Louise Penny

You lost your heart, your memories, your laughter, your brain and it even took your bones. Eventually it all came back, but different. Rearranged.

most of her clients didn't really want to get better. They wanted a pill and reassurance that whatever was wrong wasn't their fault.

His body spoke of meals enjoyed and a life of long walks rather than contact sports.

Cardinal Monkeyflower

Since Myrna was a purveyor of books, and the young agent was addicted to them, this made the bookseller her pusher, though actually more like her priestess.

It smells like someone put Oka cheese in a sweaty sock, wrapped it in an old banana peel, then sat on it," she said. "For ten years.

Gamache in anger. "He knew that's

This doesn't feel right, patron.

He said that if we thought we ould compartmentalize things, we were deluding ourselves. Everyone we meet, every word we speak, every action taken or not taken lives in our longhouse. With us. Always. Never to be expelled or locked away.

did. The Burghers of Calais." Armand raised his head and stared up into the eyes of Eustache.

If one hadn't died with a hole in her heart,' said Nichol. Clara winced.

Where there is love there is courage, where there is courage there is peace, where there is peace there is God. And when you have God, you have everything." ? Louise Penny, The Brutal Telling

Armand nodded. "She fell far from the tree.

Grief was dagger-shaped and sharp and pointed inward. It was made of fresh loss and old sorrow. Rendered and forged and sometimes polished. Irene

When you see the worst you appreciate the best.

They say time heals. I think that's bullshit, I think time does nothing. It only heals if the person wants it to. I've seen time, in the hands of a sick person, make situations worse. They ruminate and brood and turn a minor event into a catastrophe, given enough time.

He sailed through the crowd, through the front of the small church, and found himself in the gloom inside. It always struck Gamache as paradoxical that churches were gloomy. Coming in from the sunshine it took a minute or so to adjust. And even then, to Gamache, it never came close to feeling like home. Churches were either great cavernous tributes not so much to God as the wealth and privilege of the community, or they were austere, cold tributes to the ecstasy of refusal.

He hated it, hated it, when Gamache pushed him like that. Not physically, but pushed him to consider feelings. Beliefs. Emotions. When Gamache insisted that they could possibly be as important as thoughts. As facts.

You're catastrophizing, allowing fear into the driver's seat. You're reacting to things that haven't happened and behaving as though they have, or are inevitable. Focus on what is actually happening, here and now." "Surrender to reality,

Situational ethics?

Living in the wreckage of her future sure took the joy out of the present. The only comfort was that almost none of her fears had come true.

The mind is its own place, can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven,

She coughed, and Reine-Marie stopped where she was. And had to remind herself that a cough was no longer a threat. A sneeze wasn't an attack. The vaccine had worked. It was one of the great global shared experiences. The plague and the cure. But still, she had to force herself forward, to stand beside the young woman with the sniffles.

There were few things more soothing, Jean-Guy thought, than hearing people you love talking softly in another room.