Kingdom of the Blind Quotes

“the four statements that lead to wisdom: I don’t know. I need help. I was wrong. I’m sorry.”
― Louise Penny, Kingdom of the Blind

“Non. He said, ‘Be very, very careful who you let into your life. And learn to make peace with whatever happens. You can’t erase the past. It’s trapped in there with you. But you can make peace with it. If you don’t,’ he said, ‘you’ll be at perpetual war.”
― Louise Penny, Kingdom of the Blind

“And now you see why lies matter. The actual fib might not matter, but what it shows us is that what you say can’t always be trusted. You can’t always be trusted.”
― Louise Penny, Kingdom of the Blind

“As a good rule of thumb, if you have to lie, you might be doing something wrong.”
― Louise Penny, Kingdom of the Blind

“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.”
― Louise Penny, Kingdom of the Blind

“But he also knew praying was more to steady the person than inform the deity.”
― Louise Penny, Kingdom of the Blind

“It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.”
― Louise Penny, Kingdom of the Blind

“Things sometimes fell apart unexpectedly. It was not necessarily a reflection of how much they were valued.”
― Louise Penny, Kingdom of the Blind

“What I was going to say is that my mentor had this theory that our lives are like an aboriginal longhouse. Just one huge room.” He swept one arm out to illustrate scope. “He said that if we thought we could compartmentalize things, we were deluding ourselves. Everyone we meet, every word we speak, every action taken or not taken lives in our longhouse. With us. Always. Never to be expelled or locked away.”
― Louise Penny, Kingdom of the Blind

“There’s more, but I won’t go on. It’s a poem by Rupert Brooke. He was a soldier in the First World War. It helped him in the hellhole of the trenches to think of the things he loved. It helped me too. I made mental lists and followed the things I love, the people I love, back to sanity. I still do.”
― Louise Penny, Kingdom of the Blind

“There was nothing like the pain of the present to cure the pain of the past.”
― Louise Penny, Kingdom of the Blind

“It would be folly to trust the instincts of a baby. But it would also be a mistake to completely dismiss them.”
― Louise Penny, Kingdom of the Blind

“It was no use telling her he understood. Or that it was all right. She’d earned the right to no easy answer.”
― Louise Penny, Kingdom of the Blind

“Ruth Zardo. A gifted poet. One of the most distinguished in the nation. But that gift had come wrapped in more than a dollop of crazy.”
― Louise Penny, Kingdom of the Blind

“Be very, very careful who you let into your life. And learn to make peace with whatever happens. You can't erase the past. It's trapped in there with you. But you can make peace with it. If you don't,' he said, 'you'll be at perpetual war.”
― Louise Penny, Kingdom of the Blind

“Who hurt you once so far beyond repair / That you would greet each overture with curling lip.”
― Louise Penny, Kingdom of the Blind

“He was tired of the tyranny of the greater good.”
― Louise Penny, Kingdom of the Blind

“Once again the fate of reckless youth was being decided by old men behind closed doors.”
― Louise Penny, Kingdom of the Blind

“Hope itself wasn’t necessarily kind. Or a good thing.”
― Louise Penny, Kingdom of the Blind

“The mess in the drawers was in contrast to the neat desktop. Many people’s lives were like that. The neat room and the messy closet. The well-ordered counters and the chaos in the cabinets.”
― Louise Penny, Kingdom of the Blind

“In grief people were themselves and not themselves.”
― Louise Penny, Kingdom of the Blind

“You do know that the earth is round.” “The earth might be, but human nature isn’t. It has caverns and abysses and all sorts of traps.”
― Louise Penny, Kingdom of the Blind

“Their lives could not be defined by their deaths. They belonged not in perpetual pain but in the beauty of their short lives.”
― Louise Penny, Kingdom of the Blind

“In the kingdom of the blind, Amelia recited to herself as she trudged along— —the one-eyed man is king, Gamache read.”
― Louise Penny, Kingdom of the Blind

“She painted what appeared to be portraits, but that was only on the surface. The beautifully rendered flesh stretched, and sometimes sagged, over wounds, over celebrations. Over chasms of loss and rushes of joy. She painted peace and despair. All in one portrait. With brush and canvas and oils, Clara both captured and freed her subject.”
― Louise Penny, Kingdom of the Blind

“Ruth’s last book of poetry was called I’m FINE. Which sounded good until you realized, often too late, that “F.I.N.E.” stood for “Fucked-Up, Insecure, Neurotic, and Egotistical.”
― Louise Penny, Kingdom of the Blind

“In time, it wasn't all that long ago, but measured in events, it was an eternity.”
― Louise Penny, Kingdom of the Blind

“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?”
― Louise Penny, Kingdom of the Blind

“Things were pretty dire when Ruth was the healing agent.”
― Louise Penny, Kingdom of the Blind

“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”
― Louise Penny, Kingdom of the Blind