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"People wandered in for books and conversation. They brought their stories to her, some bound, and some known by heart. She recognized some of the stories as real, and some as fiction. But she honored them all, though she didn't buy every one."
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"To be stories at all they must be a series of events: but it must be understood that this series - the plot, as we call it - is only really a new whereby to catch something else."
"And as He spoke, He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before."
"Maybe stories choose how they are told and who tells them."
"That's the kind of stories I know. Sad ones. Anyway, taken to it's logical conclusion, every story is sad, because at the end everyone dies."
"My father never told us how the stories worked. He didn't reveal the layers, the nuggets of information, the fragments of truth and fantasy. He didn't need to -- because, given the right conditions, the stories activated, sowing themselves."
"I aim to make the fiction flexible so that it bends itself around the facts as we have them. Otherwise I don't see the point. Nobody seems to understand that. Nobody seems to share my approach to historical fiction. I suppose if I have a maxim, it is that there isn't any necessary conflict between good history and good drama."
"The story is one that you and I will construct together in your memory. If the story means anything to you at all, then when you remember it afterward, think of it, not as something I created, but rather as something that we made together."
"Let your story breathe and be what it really is."
"And now you'll be telling storiesof my coming backand they won't be false, and they won't be truebut they'll be real."
"The fairy tale is in a perpetual state of becoming and alteration. To keep to one version or one translation alone is to put robin redbreast in a cage."
Explore more quotes by Louise Penny
"I saw a lot of men die there. Most men. Do you know what killed them? Despair, said Finney. 'They believed themselves to be prisoners. I lived with those men, ate the same maggot-infested food, slept in the same beds, did the same back-breaking work. But they died and I lived. Do you know why? 'You were free. 'I was free. Milton was right the mind is its own place. I was never a prisoner. Not then, not now."
"Eventually he'd let the answering machine take over and had hidden in his studio. Where he's hidden all his life. From the monster. He could feel itin their bedroom now. He could feel its tail swishing by him. Feel its hot, fetid breath.All his life he knew if he was quiet enough, small enough, it wouldnn't see him. If he didn't make a fuss, didn't speak up, it wouldn't hear him, wouldn't hurt him. If he was beyond criticism and hid his cruelty with a smile and good deeds, it wouldn't devour him. By now he realized there was no hiding. It would always be there, and always find him. He was the monster."
"Where there is love there is courage,where there is courage there is peace,where there is peace there is God.And when you have God, you have everything."
"A lot of what we know to be history isn't it serves a purpose. Events are exaggerated, heroes fabricated, goals are rewritten to appear more noble than they actually were. All to manipulate public opinion, to manufacture a common purpose or enemy. And the cornerstone of a really great movement? A powerful symbol. Take away or tarnish that and everything starts to crumble, everything's questioned."
"They stared ahead. Silent. Morin had never realized murderers were caught in silence. But they were."
"His cell phone didn't work in Three Pines, and neither did email. He almost expected to see messages fluttering back and forth in the sky above the village, unable to descend."
"What killed people wasn't a bullet, a blade, a fist to the face. What killed people was a feeling. Left too long. Sometimes in the cold, frozen. Sometimes buried and fetid. And sometimes on the shores of a lake, isolated. Left to grow old, and odd."
"She taught me that life goes on, and that I had a choice. To lament what I no longer had or be grateful for what remained."
"Wait, Armand, he heard behind him but kept walking, ignoring the calls. Then he remembered what Emile had meant to him and still did. Did this one bad thing wipe everything else out?That was the danger. Not that betrayals happened, not that cruel things happened, but that they could outweigh all the good. That we could forget the good and only remember the bad.But not today. Gamache stopped."
"Maybe this was now normal for Olivier. Maybe every now and then he simply wept. Not in pain or sadness. The tears were just overwhelming memories, rendered into water, seeping out."
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