Joanne Harris Quotes

Happiness. Simple as a glass of chocolate or tortuous as the heart. Bitter. Sweet. Alive.

~ Joanne Harris

I believe that being happy is the only important thing. Happiness. Simple as a glass of chocolate or torturous as the heart. Bitter. Sweet. Alive.

~ Joanne Harris

No point carrying useless ballast. It won't change a thing.

~ Joanne Harris

The dead know everything but they don't give a damn.

~ Joanne Harris

I could do with a bit more excess. From now on I'm going to be immoderate--and volatile--I shall enjoy loud music and lurid poetry. I shall be rampant.

~ Joanne Harris

A man may plant a tree for a number of reasons. Perhaps he likes trees. Perhaps he wants shelter. Or perhaps he knows that someday he may need the firewood.

~ Joanne Harris

Your wolf is eating that man. I thought you should know.

~ Joanne Harris

Well, that's history for you, folks. Unfair, untrue and for the most part written by folk who weren't even there.

~ Joanne Harris

A named thing is a tamed thing.

~ Joanne Harris

Children are knives, my mother once said. They don’t mean to, but they cut. And yet we cling to them, don’t we, we clasp them until the blood flows.

~ Joanne Harris

I'm only keeping in touch with you for the sake of the children. Way to look after our son, by the way. I let you have him for the weekend and before I know it he's chained underground, awaiting Last Times and stinking of mead.

~ Joanne Harris

Gods? Don't let that impress you. Anyone can be a god if they have enough worshippers. You don't even have to have powers anymore. In my time I've seen theatre gods, gladiator gods, even storyteller gods - you people see gods everywhere. Gives you an excuse for not thinking for yourselves.God is just a word. Like Fury. like demon, Just words people use for things they don't understand. Reverse it and you get dog. It's just as appropriate.

~ Joanne Harris

And yet, it was still a performance. Odin and I both knew it. It was a kind of play, a dream of how things might have been if he and I had been capable of trusting each other for a change. And so we hunted, and sang, and laughed, and told heavily edited stories of the good old days, while each of us watched the other and wondered when the knife would fall.

~ Joanne Harris

There was something about total loyalty, uncritical devotion, endless patience, perpetual forgiveness and the general inability to believe that a loved one could ever do anything wrong that, frankly, just gave him the creeps.

~ Joanne Harris

People grieve in different ways, some silently, some in anger, some in spite. Rarely does grief bring out the best in people, despite what local historians like to tell you.

~ Joanne Harris

The past is an obdurate stranger that puts as many marks on us as we attempt to impose on it.

~ Joanne Harris

A black cat crossed my path, and I stopped to dance around it widdershins and to sing the

~ Joanne Harris

We didn’t see anyone that day. We had no expectations. Everything was spontaneous. There wasn’t a single moment of stress. We laughed like crazy all afternoon – though I couldn’t tell you what about. And there was definitely something in the air – call it magic if you like – because that was the happiest Christmas any of us could remember, which makes me think that perhaps, like luck, magic is something we can make for ourselves. It isn’t something you can buy. It doesn’t come as standard. And you don’t need to plan, or to overspend, or to wrack your brains trying to come up with some extraordinary way to celebrate. Because sometimes it’s the little things that bring us the greatest pleasure.

~ Joanne Harris

The advantage of travel is that after a while you begin to realize that wherever you go, most people aren't really all that much different.

~ Joanne Harris

For a time, then, we stay. For a time. Till the changes.

~ Joanne Harris

Clones fit in. Freaks stand out. Ask me which one I prefer.

~ Joanne Harris

The battle of good and evil reduced to a fat woman standing in front of a chocolate shop, saying, Will I? Won’t I? in pitiful indecision.

~ Joanne Harris

You priests. You're all the same. You think fasting helps you think about God, when anyone who can cook would tell you that fasting just makes you think about food.

~ Joanne Harris

There's also a lot of random stuff about poetry, flowers and lute music, plus kissing and cuddling (lots of this), wearing similar outfits, talking incessantly about the current object of devotion, and generally losing one's faculties.

~ Joanne Harris

Our lives are like these things I make. Turn 'em, build 'em, bake 'em in fire. That's what you've been, son. Baked and fired. But a pot don't have the right to choose whether he be for water, wine, or just left empty. You have, son. You have.

~ Joanne Harris

But stories are worlds. New worlds for us to visit. In stories, we live forever.

~ Joanne Harris

I let it go. It's like swimming against the current. It exhausts you. After a while, whoever you are, you just have to let go, and the river brings you home.

~ Joanne Harris

If you can still write in spite of the fact that you're not getting paid, that nobody cares about what you're writing, that nobody wants to publish it, that everybody is telling you to do something else, and you still want to and you still enjoy it and you can't stop doing it...then you're a writer.

~ Joanne Harris

Sometimes survival is the worst alternative there is

~ Joanne Harris

I don’t pretend to know much about love, but that’s how great love comes to an end, not in the flames of passion, but in the silence of regret.

~ Joanne Harris

Old habits never die. And when you've once been in the business of granting wishes, the impulse never quite leaves you

~ Joanne Harris

As she grew older, Maddy discovered that she had disappointed almost everyone. An awkward girl with a sullen mouth, a curtain of hair, and a tendency to slouch, she had neither Mae's sweet nature nor sweet face. Her eyes were rather beautiful, but few people ever noticed this, and it was widely believed Maddy was ugly, a troublemaker, too clever for her own good, too stubborn - or too slack - to change.Of course, folk agreed that it was not her fault she was so brown or her sister so pretty, but a smile costs nothing, as the saying goes, and if only the girl had made an effort once in a while, or even showed a little gratitude for all the help and free advice, then maybe she would have settled down.

~ Joanne Harris

I happen to know that history is nothing but a spin and metaphor, which is what all yarns are made up of, when you strip them down to the underlay. And what makes a hit or a myth, of course, is how that story is told, and by whom.

~ Joanne Harris

Library-denigrators, pay heed: suggesting that the Internet is a viable substitute for libraries is like saying porn could replace your wife.

~ Joanne Harris

The dead know everything, but don't give a damn.

~ Joanne Harris

Don't worry so much about 'not supposed to'.

~ Joanne Harris

Knowledge is currency here....

~ Joanne Harris

I dream a lot, in colour and in sound and scent. Quite a few of my stories have come from dreams.

~ Joanne Harris