566 Quotes by Louise Penny

Or – perhaps – I should just worry about my own behavior and let others be who they are.

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.

They don’t teach this at medical school, but I’ve seen it in real life. People dying in bits and pieces. A series of petites morts. Little deaths. They lose their sight, their hearing, their independence. Those are the physical ones. But there’re others. Less obvious, but more fatal. They lose heart. They lose hope. They lose faith. They lose interest. And finally, they lose themselves.

While there were few things more terrifying than being outside in a blizzard, there were few things more comforting than being inside.

Beauvoir knew that almost everyone did four things, when faced with modern technology. First they created passwords. Then they forgot them. Then, on being forced to create new ones, they simplified and went with only one, which opened everything. And then they wrote it down. And hid that paper somewhere. That way they only had to remember the place, not the password.

Sometimes the only way up is down. Sometimes the only way forward is to back up.

All year his mouth watered for the home-made Manoir Bellechasse lemonade. It tasted fresh and clean, sweet and tart. It tasted of sunshine and summer.

Some mothers see their job as preparing their kids to live in the big old world. To be independent, to marry and have children of their own. To live wherever they choose and do what makes them happy. That’s love. Others, and we all see them, cling to their children. Move to the same city, the same neighborhood. Live through them. Stifle them. Manipulate, use guilt-trips, cripple them.’ ‘Cripple them? How?’ ‘By not teaching them to be independent.

That’s a huge one, of course. Most of us are great with change, as long as it was our idea. But change imposed from the outside can send some people into a tailspin. I think Brother Albert hit it on the head. Life is loss. But out of that, as the book stresses, comes freedom. If we can accept that nothing is permanent, and change is inevitable, if we can adapt, then we’re going to be happier people.