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"Gamache nodded. It was what made his job so fascinating, and so difficult. How the same person could be both kind and cruel, compassionate and wretched. Unraveling a murder was more about getting to know the people than the evidence. People who were contrary and contradictory, and who often didn't even know themselves."
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"The orthogonal features, when combined, can explode into complexity."

"The truly privileged theories are not the ones referring to any particular scale of size or complexity, nor the ones situated at any particular level of the predictive hierarchy, but the ones that contain the deepest explanations."

"Our heart calls us one way, the mind pulls us the other way, and we do the opposite. We cannot find peace when the mind rages war against the heart, when we fight with our thoughts the pull of our love."

"Many lies lie between one truth."

"Expansion means complexity and complexity decay."

"I have been interested in phenomena involving complexity, diversity and evolution since I was a young boy."

"Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it."

"I don't really have preferred roles except those with some complexity."

"There were so many different versions of him. It was countless versions of a song, and they were all original, and they were all true, and they were all right. It should have been impossible. Was I supposed to love them all?"
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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