Quotes from The Long Way Home

“After spending most of her life scanning the horizon for slights and threats, genuine and imagined, she knew the real threat to her happiness came not from the dot in the distance, but from looking for it. Expecting it. Waiting for it. And in some cases, creating it. Her father had jokingly accused her of living in the wreckage of her future. Until one day she’d looked deep into his eyes and saw he wasn’t joking. He was warning her.”
― Louise Penny, quote from The Long Way Home

“Fear lives in the head. And courage lives in the heart. The job is to get from one to the other.” “And between the two is the lump in the throat,”
― Louise Penny, quote from The Long Way Home

“I’ll pray that you grow up a brave man in a brave country. I will pray you find a way to be useful.”
― Louise Penny, quote from The Long Way Home

“You too?" She asked Ruth. "How do your poems start out?"

"They start as a lump in the throat," she said.”
― Louise Penny, quote from The Long Way Home

“Turmoil shook loose all sorts of unpleasant truths. But it took peace to examine them.”
― Louise Penny, quote from The Long Way Home

“What’s the use of healing, if the life that’s saved is callow and selfish and ruled by fear? There’s a difference between being in sanctuary and being in hiding.”
― Louise Penny, quote from The Long Way Home

“[Being jealous] is like drinking acid, and expecting the other person to die.”
― Louise Penny, quote from The Long Way Home

“Not everyone’s an explorer, and not every explorer makes it back alive. That’s why it takes so much courage.”
― Louise Penny, quote from The Long Way Home

“If love was compass enough, said Armand quietly, there would be no missing children.”
― Louise Penny, quote from The Long Way Home

“Annie laughed. She had a face, a body, made not for a Paris runway but for good meals and books by the fire and laughter. She was constructed from, and for, happiness. But it had taken Annie Gamache a long while to find it. To trust it.”
― Louise Penny, quote from The Long Way Home

“Her voice was flat, in a way Myrna recognized from years of listening to people trying to rein in their emotions. To squash them down, flatten, them, and with them their words and their voices. Desperately trying to make the horrific sound mundane.”
― Louise Penny, quote from The Long Way Home

“Clara didn't carry a grudge. They were too heavy and she had too far to go.”
― Louise Penny, quote from The Long Way Home

“I’ll pray that you grow up a brave man in a brave country,” Clara said. “I will pray you find a way to be useful,” Gamache completed the quote. Reine-Marie dropped her eyes to her hands and saw the paper napkin twisted and shredded there. Clara nodded slowly. “I think you might be right. Peter went to Paris not to find a new artistic voice. It was simpler than that. He wanted to find a way to be useful.”
― Louise Penny, quote from The Long Way Home

“Fear lives in the head. And courage lives in the heart. The job is to get from one to the other.”
― Louise Penny, quote from The Long Way Home

“How do your poems start out?” “They start as a lump in the throat,” she said. “Isn’t that normally just a cocktail olive lodged there?” Olivier asked. “Once,” Ruth admitted. “Wrote quite a good poem before I coughed it up.”
― Louise Penny, quote from The Long Way Home

“believe in using your head. But not in spending too much time in there. Fear lives in the head. And courage lives in the heart. The job is to get from one to the other.”
― Louise Penny, quote from The Long Way Home

“Peter's a lucky man except in one respect, he doesn't seem to know how lucky he is.”
― Louise Penny, quote from The Long Way Home

“Every morning he went for a walk with his wife, Reine-Marie, and their German shepherd Henri. Tossing the tennis ball ahead of them, they ended up chasing it down themselves when Henri became distracted by a fluttering leaf, or a black fly, or the voices in his head. The dog would race after the ball, then stop and stare into thin air, moving his gigantic satellite ears this way and that. Honing in on some message. Not tense, but quizzical. It was, Gamache recognized, the way most people listened when they heard on the wind the wisps of a particularly beloved piece of music. Or a familiar voice from far away.”
― Louise Penny, quote from The Long Way Home

“Turmoil shook loose all sorts of unpleasant truths. But it took peace to examine them.”
― Louise Penny, quote from The Long Way Home

“There is a balm in Gilead,” she read from the back, “to make the wounded whole—” “There’s power enough in Heaven / To cure a sin-sick soul.”
― Louise Penny, quote from The Long Way Home

“Peter always had a ‘best before’ date stamped on his forehead,” said Ruth. “People who live in their heads do. They start out well enough, but eventually they run out of ideas. And if there’s no imagination, no inspiration to fall back on? Then what?”
― Louise Penny, quote from The Long Way Home

“Armand Gamache had seen the worst. But he’d also seen the best. Often in the same person.”
― Louise Penny, quote from The Long Way Home

“Most people want to be led. But suppose they choose the wrong leader? They end up with the Donner party.”
― Louise Penny, quote from The Long Way Home

“In a life filled with great good fortune of health, of creativity, of friends, living in safety and privilege with the loving partner. There was just one bit of misfortune in his life and that was that Peter Morrow seemed to have no idea how very fortunate he was.”
― Louise Penny, quote from The Long Way Home

“Dr. Vincent Gilbert lived in the heart of the forest. Away from human conflict, but also away from human contact. It was a compromise he was more than happy to make.”
― Louise Penny, quote from The Long Way Home

“He loved Clara. I miss a lot in life,” said Gilbert. “But I have a nose for love.” “Like a truffle pig,” said Beauvoir, then regretted it when he saw the asshole saint’s reaction. Then, unexpectedly, Gilbert smiled. “Exactly. I can smell it. Love has an aroma all its own, you know.” Beauvoir looked at Gilbert, amazed by what he’d just heard. Maybe, he thought, this man was— “Smells like compost,” said Gilbert. —an asshole after all.”
― Louise Penny, quote from The Long Way Home

“An unsuspected yearning uncovered, discovered. For a simpler time and a simpler life. Before Internet, and climate change, and terrorism. When neighbors worked together, and separation was not a topic or an issue or wise.”
― Louise Penny, quote from The Long Way Home

“This was the great benefit of seeing worse. Fewer things worried him now.”
― Louise Penny, quote from The Long Way Home

“A coy smile could capture him, but it was finally a hearty laugh that had freed him.”
― Louise Penny, quote from The Long Way Home

“Sometimes the only way up is down. Sometimes the only way forward is to back up.”
― Louise Penny, quote from The Long Way Home

About the author

Popular quotes

“Everyday, every hour, I have held you close in my heart.”
― Elizabeth Chandler, quote from Evercrossed

“It is possible to be a fan of reality TV, talent shows and bubblegum pop and still have a brain. You will also see that a great many people know perfectly well how silly and camp and trivial their fandom is. They do not check in their minds when they enter a fan site. Judgement is not necessarily fled to brutish beasts, and men have not quite lost their reason. Which is all a way of questioning whether pop-culture hero worship is really so psychically damaging, so erosive of cognitive faculties, so corrupting of the soul of mankind as we are so often told.”
― Stephen Fry, quote from The Fry Chronicles

“In the words of a Zen poem, At dusk the cock announces dawn; At midnight, the bright sun.”
― Fritjof Capra, quote from The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism

“My goal is to make you scream my name. Give me what I want, but make me work for it.”
― Olivia Cunning, quote from Try Me

“It hurts to be around life. People don't understand how close death is, right over their shoulders, around the block, at the end of a street. It's everywhere.”
― Jessica Sorensen, quote from Ember

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.