566 Quotes by Louise Penny

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.

Maps gave them control over their surroundings, for the first time ever. It showed how to get from one place to another. It sounds simple now, but a thousand years ago it would have been an incredible feat of imagination and imagery. All maps are drawn as though looking down. From a bird’s point of view. From their god’s point of view. Imagine being the first person to think of that. To be able to wrap their minds around a perspective they’d never seen. And then draw it.

Entitlement was, she knew, a terrible thing. It chained the person to their victimhood. It gobbled up all the air around it. Until the person lived in a vacuum, where nothing good could flourish. And the tragedy was almost always compounded, Myrna knew. These people invariably passed it on from generation to generation. Magnified each time. The sore point became their family legend, their myth, their legacy. What they lost became their most prized possession. Their inheritance.

The banality of evil. It wasn’t the frothing madman. It was the conscientious us.

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.

Not everyone makes the boat, she thought.

He tried to let her know it would be all right. Eventually. Life wouldn’t always be this painful. The world wouldn’t always be this brutal. Give it time, little one. Give it another chance. Come back.

The memory of the heart was far stronger than whatever was kept in the mind. The question was, what did people keep in their heart?

Living in the wreckage of her future sure took the joy out of the present.