Hello and Welcome. This page is a collection of 16 quotes that I liked and saved while reading Still Life book by Louise Penny. I hope you will like them too.
By the way, I am Deepak Kundu, an avid book reader, quotes collector and blogger.
Still Life Quotes
- I’m normally lost in thought. Never deep or important thoughts. My mother used to laugh and say some people try to be in two places at once. I, on the other hand, am generally nowhere.
- As you’ll discover, I’m just like this. I have no talent for choosing my battles. Life seems, strangely, like a battle to me. The whole thing.
- Almost invariably people expected that if you were a good person you shouldn’t meet a bad end, that only the deserving are killed. And certainly only the deserving are murdered. However well hidden and subtle, there was a sense that a murdered person had somehow asked for it. That’s why the shock when someone they knew to be kind and good was a victim. There was a feeling that surely there had been a mistake.
- I’ve never met anyone uniformly kind and good.
- A good leader was also a good follower.
- I watch. I’m very good at observing. Noticing things. And listening. Actively listening to what people are saying, their choice of words, their tone. What they aren’t saying.
- Homes were a self-portrait. A person’s choice of color, furnishing, pictures. Every touch revealed the individual. God, or the Devil, was in the details. And so was the human. Was it dirty, messy, obsessively clean? Were the decorations chosen to impress, or were they a hodgepodge of personal history? Was the space cluttered or clear?
- Have you ever been to boarding school? […] It’s Darwinism at its most refined. You adapt or die. You learn that the skills that allow you to survive are cunning, cheating, bullying, lying. Either that or just plain hiding.
- Most of us are great with change, as long as it was our idea. But change imposed from the outside can send some people into a tailspin.
- I think many people love their problems. Gives them all sorts of excuses for not growing up and getting on with life.
- Life is change. If you aren’t growing and evolving you’re standing still, and the rest of the world is surging ahead.
- The fault lies with us, and only us. It’s not fate, not genetics, not bad luck, and it’s definitely not Mom and Dad. Ultimately it’s us and our choices. But, the most powerful, spectacular thing is that the solution rests with us as well. We’re the only ones who can change our lives, turn them around. So all those years waiting for someone else to do it are wasted.
- At what point does change happen? Sometimes it’s sudden. The ‘ah ha’ moments in our lives, when we suddenly see. But often it’s a gradual change, an evolution.
- Living our lives was like living in a long house. We entered as babies at one end, and we exited when our time came. And in between we moved through this one, great, long room. Everyone we ever met, and every thought and action lived in that room with us. Until we made peace with the less agreeable parts of our past they’d continue to heckle us from way down the long house. And sometimes the really loud, obnoxious ones told us what to do, directing our actions even years later.
- They say time heals. I think that’s bullshit, I think time does nothing. It only heals if the person wants it to. I’ve seen time, in the hands of a sick person, make situations worse. They ruminate and brood and turn a minor event into a catastrophe, given enough time.
- This is what comes of trust and friendship, loyalty and love. You get screwed. Betrayed. You get wounded so deeply you can barely breathe and sometimes it kills you. Or worse. It kills the people you love most.