“Three Pines is a state of mind. When we choose tolerance over hate. Kindness over cruelty. Goodness over bullying. When we choose to be hopeful, not cynical. Then we live in Three Pines.”
― Louise Penny, quote from Glass Houses
“We see it when bullies are in charge. It becomes part of the culture of an institution, a family, an ethnic group, a country. It becomes not just acceptable, but expected. Applauded even.”
― Louise Penny, quote from Glass Houses
“It wasn’t really, he knew, about less fear. It was about more courage.”
― Louise Penny, quote from Glass Houses
“November was the transition month. A sort of purgatory. It was the cold damp breath between dying and death. Between fall and the dead of winter.”
― Louise Penny, quote from Glass Houses
“Jesus, is Gamache hiring fetuses now?”
― Louise Penny, quote from Glass Houses
“the Maori and their haka. It is death. It is death, they chant. To terrify, to petrify.”
― Louise Penny, quote from Glass Houses
“Yes, facts were necessary. But frankly, anyone could be trained to collect a bloodstain or find a hair. Or an affair. Or a bank balance that didn’t balance. But feelings? Only the bravest wandered into that fiery realm.”
― Louise Penny, quote from Glass Houses
“Henri kept everything important in his heart. He mostly kept cookies in his head.”
― Louise Penny, quote from Glass Houses
“He often said that words told them what someone was thinking, but the tone told them how they felt.”
― Louise Penny, quote from Glass Houses
“But Beauvoir could feel what Ruth was sensing. Something was radiating off Gamache. Was it rage he felt from the chief? Jean-Guy wondered. It certainly wasn’t fear. It was actually, Beauvoir realized with some surprise, extreme calm.”
― Louise Penny, quote from Glass Houses
“But Beauvoir could feel what Ruth was sensing. Something was radiating off Gamache. Was it rage he felt from the chief? Jean-Guy wondered. It certainly wasn’t fear. It was actually, Beauvoir realized with some surprise, extreme calm. He was like the center of gravity in the room.”
― Louise Penny, quote from Glass Houses
“The banality of evil. It wasn’t the frothing madman. It was the conscientious us.”
― Louise Penny, quote from Glass Houses
“We’re used to the film versions of psychopaths. The clearly crazies. But most psychopaths are clever. They have to be. They know how to mimic human behavior. How to pretend to care, while not actually feeling anything except perhaps rage and an overwhelming and near-perpetual sense of entitlement. That they’ve been wronged. They get what they want mostly through manipulation.”
― Louise Penny, quote from Glass Houses
“the clatter of pots and pans and dishes. To others it was a cacophony. To Anton it was a symphony.”
― Louise Penny, quote from Glass Houses
“It was an oddly comforting sight, for men and women who’d been immersed in brutality. Who’d worn their guns more proudly than their badges.”
― Louise Penny, quote from Glass Houses
“common,” said Zalmanowitz. The comment surprised Chief Superintendent”
― Louise Penny, quote from Glass Houses
“I'm sorry. I shouldn't be working."
"Of course you should. I'm alright."
"Even F.I.N.E.?"
She laughed. "Especially that."
Fucked-up. Insecure. Neurotic. Egotistical.”
― Louise Penny, quote from Glass Houses
“conscience is not necessarily a good thing. How many gays are beaten, how many abortion clinics bombed, how many blacks lynched, how many Jews murdered, by people just following their conscience?”
― Louise Penny, quote from Glass Houses
“The two men emerged from the narrow street into the open square in front of Notre-Dame Basilica, weaving around tourists taking photographs of themselves in front of the cathedral. When looked at years from now, they’d see the magnificent structure, and a whole lot of sweaty people in shorts and sundresses wilting in the scorching heat as the sun throbbed down on the cobblestones.”
― Louise Penny, quote from Glass Houses
“No,” said Myrna. “It happened because no one stopped them. Not enough people stood up soon enough. And why was that?” “Fear?” asked Clara. “Yes, partly. And partly programming. All around them, respectable Germans saw others behaving brutally toward people they considered outsiders. The Jews, gypsies, gays. It became normal and acceptable. No one told them what was happening was wrong. In fact, just the opposite.” “No one should have had to,” snapped Reine-Marie. “Myrna’s right,” said Armand, breaking his silence. “We see what she describes all the time. I saw it in the Sûreté Academy. I saw it in the brutality of the Sûreté itself. We see it when bullies are in charge. It becomes part of the culture of an institution, a family, an ethnic group, a country. It becomes not just acceptable, but expected. Applauded even.”
― Louise Penny, quote from Glass Houses
“A lie was a light. One that grew into a floodlight, that eventually illuminated the person among them with the biggest secret. The most to hide.”
― Louise Penny, quote from Glass Houses
“Unlike most of us, who tend to be transparent, people rarely see through a psychopath,” she continued. “He’s masterful. People trust and believe him. Even like him. It’s his great skill. Convincing people that his point of view is legitimate and right, often when all the evidence points in the other direction. Like Iago. It’s a kind of magic.”
― Louise Penny, quote from Glass Houses
“They all had them. Secrets. But some stank more than others.”
― Louise Penny, quote from Glass Houses
“always struck him how much more effective silence was than words. If the effect you were after was to disconcert.”
― Louise Penny, quote from Glass Houses
“It’s important, Madeleine, not to cut people out of our lives. Isolation doesn’t make us better at our job. It makes us weaker, more vulnerable.”
― Louise Penny, quote from Glass Houses
“Was it too much? Tomorrow at this time, would they all be arrested? Would they all still be alive? When she left to go home to Joan that evening, would a cobrador fall into step behind her, down the long, stifling corridor? For doing too much? For doing too little? She wished now she hadn’t invited them into her chambers. Hadn’t forced the truth, and the lies, from them. She wished she could hide in happy ignorance. Go home to beer and burgers. The one question the Chief Superintendent hadn’t answered was who the defendant really was. And how the murder of Katie Evans was connected to all this. But she knew she’d find out”
― Louise Penny, quote from Glass Houses
“He sounded more confident than he really was. But Chief Superintendent Gamache understood that a leader could not afford to reveal his own emotions. He couldn't demand courage in others while quaking in fear himself.”
― Louise Penny, quote from Glass Houses
Louise Penny
Born place: in Toronto, Canada
Born date July 1, 1958
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“Chet! What are you eating?”
Nothing. It was true. The eating part was over.”
― Spencer Quinn, quote from Dog on It
“To the Germans, these Jewish foreigners, so different from the local bourgeois Jews who had, with discipline, allowed themselves t be rounded up and slaughtered, seemed suspect: too quick, too energetic, dirty, tattered, proud, unpredictable, primitive, too "Russian". The Jews found it impossible, and at the same time necessary, to distinguish the headhunters they had eluded and on whom they had taken passionate revenge from these shy, reserved old people, these blond, polite children who looked in at the station doors as if through the bars of the zoo. They aren't the ones, no; but it's their father, their teachers, their sons, themselves yesterday and tomorrow. How to resolve the puzzle? It can't be solved. Leave: as soon as possible. This land, too, is searing under our feet, this neat, trim town, loving order, this sweet bland air of full summer also scorches Leave, leave: we haven't come from the depths of Polessia in order to go to sleep in the Wartesaal of Plauen-am-Elster, and to while away our waiting with group snapshots and the Red Cross soup.”
― Primo Levi, quote from If Not Now, When?
“Lincoln Steffens has a fable of a man who climbed to the top of a mountain and, standing on tiptoe, seized hold of the Truth. Satan, suspecting mischief from this upstart, had directed one of his underlings to tail him; but when the demon reported with alarm the man’s success—that he had seized hold of the Truth—Satan was unperturbed. “Don’t worry,” he yawned. “I’ll tempt him to institutionalize it.” That”
― Huston Smith, quote from The World's Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions
“You have to notice people to be that sure about them.”
― Sheri S. Tepper, quote from Beauty
“He was permitted, without restriction, to speak of himself as immoral, agnostic and socialistic, so long as it was universally known that he remained pure, Presbyterian, and Republican.”
― Sinclair Lewis, quote from Arrowsmith
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