Gamache Quotes

#1. He was like an addict before a fix. Book freaks are like that, and not just old guys. Look at kids lining up for the latest installment of their favorite books. Stories, they're addictive." Gamache

Louise Penny

#2. Gamache had been to Three Pines on previous investigations and each time he'd had the feeling he belonged. It was a powerful feeling. After all, what else did people really want except to belong? He

Louise Penny

#3. A poem begins as a lump in the throat? Gamache asked Ruth. The elderly woman held his eyes

Louise Penny

#4. Yes, I do. The ones who aren't growing and evolving, who are standing still. They're the ones who rarely got better.' 'Yes, that was it,' said Gamache. 'They waited for life to happen to them. They waited for someone to save them. Or heal them. They did nothing for themselves.' 'Ben,' said Peter.

Louise Penny

#5. Chief Inspector Gamache knew one thing about hate. It bound you forever to the person you hated. Murder wasn't committed out of hate, it was done as a terrible act of freedom. To finally rid yourself of the burden.

Louise Penny

#6. Norris didn't cry, but he was apt to puke on them, the way he had puked on homer gamache that time he had found homer sprawled in a ditch out by homeland cemetary, beaten to death with his own artificial arm.

Stephen King

#7. Where other women ... were lovely, Annie Gamache was alive.
Late, too late, Jean Guy Beauvoir had come to appreciate how very important it was, how very attractive it was, how very rare it was, to be fully alive.

Louise Penny

#8. Gamache enjoyed going to churches for their music and the beauty of the language and the stillness. But he felt closer to God in his Volvo.

Louise Penny

#9. Do you know what I've learned, after three decades of death?" Gamache asked, leaning toward the agent and lowering his voice. Despite himself, the agent leaned forward. "I've learned how precious life is.

Louise Penny

#10. Our lives are like a house. Some people are allowed on the lawn, some onto the porch, some get into the vestibule or the kitchen. The better friends are invited deeper into our home, into our living room.'
'And some are let into the bedroom,' said Gamache.

Louise Penny

#11. Maybe that's what old men are for. To make decisions that no young man can." He was watching Gamache closely. "Or should have to.

Louise Penny

#12. Gamache had asked not because he didn't know the answer, but because he wanted to see if Peter would lie to him. He had. And if he'd lie about that, what else had he lied about?

Louise Penny

#13. Let every man shovel out his own snow, and the whole city will be passable," said Gamache. Seeing Beauvoir's puzzled expression he added, "Emerson."
"Lake and Palmer?"
"Ralph and Waldo.

Louise Penny

#14. People instinctively let down their guard when they saw a limp, an illness, a flaw in someone else. Not out of compassion but because it made them feel superior. Stronger. Those people, Gamache knew, did not always last long. It was not a useful instinct.

Louise Penny

#15. Old sins have long shadows," said Gamache. "And this is an old sin.

Louise Penny

#16. When senior officers start shooting each other, it's time to leave," said Gamache. "I'm sure it's somewhere in the regulations.

Louise Penny

#17. Ruth whacked the seat beside her on the sofa, in what could only be interpreted as an invitation. It was like receiving a personalized Molotov cocktail. Gamache

Louise Penny

#18. 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

#19. Shakespeare: ... the best way to peace is to have a still and quiet conscience. Or none at all, thought Gamache.

Louise Penny

#20. One day that ego of yours'll kill you. That's all it is, you know. You pretend it's selfless, you pretend to be the great teacher, the wise and patient Armand Gamache, but you and I both know it's ego. Pride. Be careful, my friend. She's dangerous. You've said so yourself.

Louise Penny

#21. How close you came to dying? I did." "Maybe this is why I didn't." Hancock regarded Gamache. "Are you saying you were spared to stop me from jumping over the cliff?

Louise Penny

#22. Why did he kill his own mother?' Ruth asked.
'The oldest story in the book,' said Gamache.
'Ben was a male prostitute?' Gabri exclaimed.
'That's the oldest profession. Where do you keep your head?' asked Ruth. 'Never mind, don't answer that.

Louise Penny

#23. Chief Superintendent Arnot might hold power, but Armand Gamache was the more powerful man.

Louise Penny

#24. Armand Gamache found murderers by following the trail of rancid emotions. Beside

Louise Penny

#25. Gamache in anger. "He knew that's

Louise Penny

#26. Armand Gamache wondered whether CC de Poitiers was at that very moment trying to explain herself to a perplexed God and two very angry seals.

Louise Penny

#27. Armand Gamache had seen the worst. But he'd also seen the best. Often in the same person.

Louise Penny

#28. But you want murderous feelings? Hang around librarians," confided Gamache. "All that silence. Gives them ideas.

Louise Penny

#29. Do you know, Armand, I can't remember the last time I felt safe." "I know what you mean," said Gamache. "It feels as though this has been going on forever." "No, I don't mean just this mess. I mean all my life.

Louise Penny

#30. Gamache wondered how low the bar was set when all a man had to do to attract a woman was not smell like decomposing bears.

Louise Penny

#31. His heart filled his chest and ran to the end of his tail and the very tips of his considerable ears. It filled his head, squeezing out his brain. But Henri, the foundling, was a humanist, and while not particularly clever was the smartest creature Gamache knew. Everything he knew he knew by heart.

Louise Penny

#32. For Armand Gamache knew what not-nice was. He knew what cruelty, despair, horror were. And he knew what a forgotten, and precious quality 'nice'was.

Louise Penny

#33. They'd reached St Thomas's and climbed the half-dozen wooden steps to the small veranda. Gamache

Louise Penny

#34. It was said with humor, but the criticism wasn't lost on Gamache. He was fishing, and he knew it. So did Sommes. So did Esther. We're all fishermen, she'd said.

Louise Penny

#35. Saw Gamache shaking his head he reconsidered. Not the maps?

Louise Penny

#36. And yet,' Gamache continued in a pleasant voice, 'isn't that what's often taught in meditation? Not the absence of emotion, or swallowing them, but not allowing them to run the show?

Louise Penny

#37. As she got closer, Clara Morrow saw Gamache do it again. He took off his half-moon reading glasses, then

Louise Penny

#38. In the kitchen Gamache's German shepherd, Henri, sat up in his bed and cocked his head. He had huge oversized ears which made Gamache think he wasn't purebred but a cross between a shepherd and a satellite dish.

Louise Penny

#39. Gamache was the best of them, the smartest and bravest and strongest because he was willing to go into his own head alone, and open all the doors there, and enter all the dark rooms. And make friends with what he found there.

Louise Penny

#40. She suspected if they looked in Gamache's bedside table, they'd find all sorts of lost souls he put there for safekeeping. And maybe a baguette.

Louise Penny

#41. Armand Gamache had always held unfashionable beliefs. He believed the light would banish the shadows. That kindness was more powerful than cruelty, and that goodness existed, even in the most desperate places. He believed that evil had its limits.

Louise Penny

#42. ... it's not the truth about others that will set you free, but the truth about yourself.

Louise Penny