A Great Reckoning Quotes

“Don’t believe everything you think.”
― Louise Penny, A Great Reckoning

“There is always a road back. If we have the courage to look for it, and take it. I'm sorry. I was wrong. I don't know. I need help. These are the signposts. The cardinal directions.”
― Louise Penny, A Great Reckoning

“It’s so easy to get mired in the all too obvious cruelty of the world. It’s natural. But to really heal, we need to recognize the goodness too.”
― Louise Penny, A Great Reckoning

“Don’t believe everything you think,” said Gamache, before releasing the hand and opening the door. “Pema Chödrön. A Buddhist nun.”
― Louise Penny, A Great Reckoning

“When someone shoots at us, we return fire,” said Jean-Guy. Now Jacques did nod. “But it’s equally important that when someone is kind to us, we return that as well,”
― Louise Penny, A Great Reckoning

“Things are strongest where they’re broken,”
― Louise Penny, A Great Reckoning

“Love and worry. They went hand in hand. Fellow travelers.”
― Louise Penny, A Great Reckoning

“The lines of his face were the longitude and latitude of his life.”
― Louise Penny, A Great Reckoning

“One must always have a song in the heart.” “And an éclair in the hand,”
― Louise Penny, A Great Reckoning

“It’s too easy to feed the anger. Too cowardly to stoke the hate. You must look inside yourself and decide who you are and who you want to be. Character is not created in times like these. It’s revealed. This is a trying time. A testing time. Be careful.”
Chapter 14 · Page 122 · Location 2188”
― Louise Penny, A Great Reckoning

“There is always a road back. If we have the courage to look for it, and take it.”
― Louise Penny, A Great Reckoning

“Your brain is your weapon.”
― Louise Penny, A Great Reckoning

“Don't believe everything you think.”
― Louise Penny, A Great Reckoning

“The world turned upside down,' Beauvoir continued. 'It was at once more beautiful and more frightening than you'd been led to believe. And suddenly you didn't know what to do. Who to trust. Where to turn. It's terrifying. Being lost is so much worse than being on the wrong road. That's why people stay on it for so long.”
― Louise Penny, A Great Reckoning

“Anyone could be clever. Anyone could be smart. Anyone could be taught. But not everyone was kind."
Chapter 1 · Page 10 · Location 202”
― Louise Penny, A Great Reckoning

“Character is not created in times like these. It’s revealed.”
― Louise Penny, A Great Reckoning

“And she knew that that was why drugs were so dangerous. Because they blew the mind. Not the heart. But the mind. And the heart followed. And the soul followed that.”
― Louise Penny, A Great Reckoning

“Kindness beats cruelty.”
― Louise Penny, A Great Reckoning

“A belief of convenience isn't much use, is it?”
― Louise Penny, A Great Reckoning

“Rumors are hard to prove, but they’re even harder to disprove. We both know that character assassination is easy. All it takes is a suggestion. A well-placed word in someone’s ear.”
― Louise Penny, A Great Reckoning

“emotions were far from linear. They were circles and waves and dots and triangles. But they were rarely a straight line."
Chapter 13 · Page 114 · Location 2031”
― Louise Penny, A Great Reckoning

“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, A Great Reckoning

“Ruth believed in precycling. An evolution on recycling. She made use of things before people threw them out.”
― Louise Penny, A Great Reckoning

“It was a careworn face. But most of the lines, if followed back like a trail, would lead to happiness. To the faces a face made when laughing or smiling, or sitting quietly enjoying the day.

Though some of those lines led elsewhere. Into a wilderness, into the wild. Where terrible things had happened. Some of the lines of his face led to events inhuman and abominable. To horrific sights. To unspeakable acts.

Some of them his.

The lines of his face were the longitude and latitude of his life.”
― Louise Penny, A Great Reckoning

“There is always a road back. If we have the courage to look for it, and take it. I’m sorry. I was wrong. I don’t know.” He paused again. “I need help. Those are the signposts. The cardinal directions.”
― Louise Penny, A Great Reckoning

“The morning after their deaths, Armand had gone into their room. The scent of them, the sense of them, almost too much to bear. The clothing. The book. The bookmark. The bedside clock, still ticking. He'd thought that strange. Surely it should have stopped.”
― Louise Penny, A Great Reckoning

“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.”
― Louise Penny, A Great Reckoning

“He inhaled deeply and exhaled the word “people.” Not so much an indictment as in wonderment. That there could be so much deliberate cruelty and so much kindness in one species.”
― Louise Penny, A Great Reckoning

“Marcus Aurelius. The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.”
― Louise Penny, A Great Reckoning

“Who made the rule that people shouldn’t eat or drink in a church?” So they’d tried it. At first it felt awkward, wrong. As though God would be offended if people took a meal in his house. Until they realized that the sacrilege wasn’t eating and talking and laughing in the chapel. It was leaving it empty.”
― Louise Penny, A Great Reckoning