“But you want murderous feelings? Hang around librarians," confided Gamache. "All that silence. Gives them ideas.”
― Louise Penny, quote from A Rule Against Murder
“We're all blessed and we're all blighted, Chief Inspector," said Finney. "Everyday each of us does our sums. The question is, what do we count?”
― Louise Penny, quote from A Rule Against Murder
“The only thing money really buys?...Space. A bigger house, a bigger car, a larger hotel room. First-class plane tickets. But it doesn't even buy comfort. No one complains more than the rich and entitled. Comfort, security, ease. None of them come with money.”
― Louise Penny, quote from A Rule Against Murder
“Her tragedy was that she always found men to save her. She never had to save herself. She never knew she could.”
― Louise Penny, quote from A Rule Against Murder
“It's a shame that creativity and sloth look exactly the same.”
― Louise Penny, quote from A Rule Against Murder
“She taught me that life goes on, and that I had a choice. To lament what I no longer had or be grateful for what remained.”
― Louise Penny, quote from A Rule Against Murder
“You can tell a lot about a man by his friends, or lack of them. Do they bring out the best in each other, or are they always gossiping, tearing others down? Keeping wounds alive?”
― Louise Penny, quote from A Rule Against Murder
“Not everything needed to be brought into the light, he knew. Not every truth needed to be told.”
― Louise Penny, quote from A Rule Against Murder
“Murder was deeply human. A person was killed and a person killed. And what powered the final thrust wasn't a whim, wasn't an event. It was an emotion. Something once healthy and human had become wretched and bloated and finally buried. But not put to rest. It lay there, often for decades, feeding on itself, growing and gnawing, grim and full of grievance. Until it finally broke free of all human restraint. Not conscience, not fear, not social convention could contain it. When that happened, all hell broke loose. And a man became a monster.”
― Louise Penny, quote from A Rule Against Murder
“the feelings flattened and folded and turned into something else, like emotional origami.”
― Louise Penny, quote from A Rule Against Murder
“Rules meant order. Without them they’d be killing each other. It began with butting in, with parking in disabled spaces, with smoking in elevators. And it ended in murder.”
― Louise Penny, quote from A Rule Against Murder
“What killed people wasn't a bullet, a blade, a fist to the face. What killed people was a feeling. Left too long. Sometimes in the cold, frozen. Sometimes buried and fetid. And sometimes on the shores of a lake, isolated. Left to grow old, and odd.”
― Louise Penny, quote from A Rule Against Murder
“Be careful. You're making hurting a habit. Spreading it around won't lessen your pain, you know. Just the opposite.”
― Louise Penny, quote from A Rule Against Murder
“…believing sarcasm and rude remarks kept the monsters at bay. They didn’t.”
― Louise Penny, quote from A Rule Against Murder
“…it’s not the truth about others that will set you free, but the truth about yourself.”
― Louise Penny, quote from A Rule Against Murder
“…the most devastating thing Finney could have said. Not that Peter was hated by his father. But that he’d been loved all along. He’d interpreted kindness as cruelty, generosity as meanness, support as tethers. How horrible to have been offered love, and to have chosen hate instead. He’d turned heaven into hell.”
― Louise Penny, quote from A Rule Against Murder
“…the pain of neuralgia…she knew what they thought. That she was cold. Couldn't feel. But in fact she felt too much. Too deeply.”
― Louise Penny, quote from A Rule Against Murder
“To live in chaos was to live in a prison. Order freed the mind for other things.”
― Louise Penny, quote from A Rule Against Murder
“She was stuffing her innards back. Sewing herself up, putting her skin, her make-up, her party frock back on.”
― Louise Penny, quote from A Rule Against Murder
“He was drawn to the edge of things. To the places old mariners knew, and warned, “Beyond here be monsters.”… He stepped into the beyond, and found the monsters hidden deep inside all the reasonable, gentle, laughing people. He went where even they were afraid to go.”
― Louise Penny, quote from A Rule Against Murder
“The reason Armand Gamache could go there was because it wasn't totally foreign to him. He knew it because he’d seen his own burned terrain, he’d walked off the familiar and comfortable path inside his own head and heart and seen what festered in the dark. And one day Jean Guy Beauvoir would look at his own monsters, and then be able to recognize others. And maybe this was the day and this was the case. He hoped so.”
― Louise Penny, quote from A Rule Against Murder
“…walked deep into the shadow, deep into the longhouse where all his experiences and memories lived…”
― Louise Penny, quote from A Rule Against Murder
“What could be worse? Dying, and not being missed.”
― Louise Penny, quote from A Rule Against Murder
“Irene Finney, like many very elderly people, knew that the world was indeed flat. It had a beginning and an end. And she had come to the edge.”
― Louise Penny, quote from A Rule Against Murder
“Have you noticed that more people seem to be dying than are being born? Bean asked, handing the section to Finney, who took it and nodded solemnly.
“That means there’s more for those of us still here.” He handed the section back.
“I don’t want more,” said Bean.
“You will.”
― Louise Penny, quote from A Rule Against Murder
“They spoke in semaphore, all punctuation unnecessary.
“You?”
“Great.”
They’d trimmed the language to its essentials. Before long it would just be consonants. Then silence.”
― Louise Penny, quote from A Rule Against Murder
“Irene Finney filled the void with a child not loved then lost, but first lost, then loved.”
― Louise Penny, quote from A Rule Against Murder
“Do you know why we’re all happy here, monsieur? Because it’s the last house on the road.”
― Louise Penny, quote from A Rule Against Murder
“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 Finney had taken her daughter’s death and to that sorrow she’d added a long life of entitlement and disappointment, of privilege and pride. And the dagger she’d fashioned was taking a brief break from slashing her insides, and was now pointed outward.”
― Louise Penny, quote from A Rule Against Murder
Louise Penny
Born place: in Toronto, Canada
Born date July 1, 1958
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“Over the years I’ve noticed that only men use this phrase—“unlucky in love”—in reference exclusively to unmarried women, as if they can’t possibly comprehend that contentment or even happiness is possible without the centrality of a man.”
― Kate Bolick, quote from Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own
“If each person in the room promises that in the twenty-four hours beginning the very next day she or he will do at least one outrageous thing in the name of simple justice, then I promise I will, too. It doesn't matter whether the act is as small as saying, "Pick yourself up" (a major step for those of us who have been our family's servants) or as large as calling for a strike. The point is that, if each of us does as promised, we can be pretty sure of two results. First, the world one day later won't be quite the same.
Second, we will have such a good time doing it that we will never again get up in the morning saying, "WILL I do anything outrageous?" but only "WHAT outrageous act will I do today”
― Gloria Steinem, quote from Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions
“He would have been forty-two years old in two months. His forty-first had been his very last birthday, as it turned out.”
― David Baldacci, quote from The Last Mile
“Those people, for example, who can avenge their wrongs and generally stand up for themselves – how do they do it?”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from Notes from Underground & The Double
“It's strange, the lack of emotion, the absence of drama in reality. When things happen in real life, extraordinary things, there's no music, there's no dah-dah-daaahhs. There's no close-ups. No dramatic camera angles. Nothing happens. Nothing stops, the rest of the world goes on.”
― Kevin Brooks, quote from Martyn Pig
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