Top 100 Joanne Harris Quotes
#1. Polite contempt. The barbed and poisonous weapon of the righteous.
Joanne Harris
#2. An apple a day keeps the doctor away.
No one's immune to bribery.
Joanne Harris
#3. It may be something to do with my having been to a girls' school, but I'm far more comfortable making male friendships than female ones. My friends tend to be men and their significant others.
Joanne Harris
#4. 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
#5. Those people who say that words have no power know nothing of the nature of words. Words, well placed, can end a regime; can turn affection to hatred; can start a religion or even a war. Words are the shepherds of lies; they lead the best of us to the slaughter.
Joanne Harris
#6. Library-denigrators, pay heed: suggesting that the Internet is a viable substitute for libraries is like saying porn could replace your wife.
Joanne Harris
#7. People reveal so much of their mental processes online, simply because the psychological effect of anonymity just means that a whole raft of inhibitions are left alone when people log on.
Joanne Harris
#8. My parents were language teachers. They talked about teaching all the time and all their friends were teachers. It was considered a pre-ordained thing that I would go into teaching.
Joanne Harris
#9. It's a feeling which tells me that any woman can be beautiful in the eyes of a man who loves her.
Joanne Harris
#10. 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
#12. You seem to know a lot about it," she said. "And you do subtleties."
"Yeah. Like I've always wanted to destroy the Nine Worlds while committing suicide."
"Well, there's no need to be rude," protested Sif.
Joanne Harris
#13. I've never viewed you as an enemy, more an adversary ...
Joanne Harris
#14. We came in the wind of the carnival. A wind of change, or promises. The merry wind, the magical wind, making March hares of everyone, tumbling blossoms and coat-tails and hats; rushing towards summer in a frenzy of exuberance.
Joanne Harris
#15. In the old days of literature, only the very thick-skinned - or the very brilliant - dared enter the arena of literary criticism. To criticise a person's work required equal measures of erudition and wit, and inferior critics were often the butt of satire and ridicule.
Joanne Harris
#16. 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
#17. Weeds and wheat cannot grow peacefully together. Any gardener could tell you the same thing.
Joanne Harris
#18. 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
#19. Wild birds will kill exotic ones: the budgies and the lovebirds and the yellow canaries
escaped from their cages and hoping to get a taste of the sky
usually end up back on the ground, plucked raw by their more conformist cousins
Joanne Harris
#20. More. Oh that word. That deceptive word. That eater of lives; that malcontent.
Joanne Harris
#21. Some people spend the whole of their lives sitting waiting for one train, only to find that they never even made it to the station.
Joanne Harris
#22. At17, balanced on that precarious walkway between adolescence and adulthood, the world is a crazy obstacle course paved one day with broken glass, the next with apple blossom.
Joanne Harris
#23. I don't understand a word you're saying," snapped Odin.
"That's because you're throttlin' me, sir," said Sugar.
Odin loosened his grip.
Joanne Harris
#24. Their love was something which coloured the air between them like sunlight.
Joanne Harris
#25. Like a domestic cat, purring on the sofa by day, but by night, a strutting queen, a natural killer, disdainful of her other life.
Joanne Harris
#26. 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
#27. I don't think that white collar gives you sole right of access to the divine.
Joanne Harris
#28. I think if you are an outsider then you are an outsider always.
Joanne Harris
#29. My mother have taught me that food is a universal passport. Whatever the constraints of language, culture or geography, food crosses over all boundaries. To offer food is to extend the hand of friendship; to accept is to be accepted into the most closed of communities. I
Joanne Harris
#30. I can smell her perfume, something flowery, too strong in this enclosed darkness. I wonder if this is temptation. If so, I am stone.
Joanne Harris
#31. I have an English identity and a French identity. When I'm in France, I'm more outgoing. And the French part of me cooks, whereas the English part of me writes.
Joanne Harris
#32. Sheep are not the docile, pleasant creatures of the pastoral idyll. Any countryman will tell you that. They are sly, occasionally vicious, pathologically stupid. The lenient shepherd may find his flock unruly, definant. I cannot afford to be lenient.
Joanne Harris
#33. Places have their own characters ... But the people begin to look the same.
Joanne Harris
#34. You don't write because someone sets assignments! You write because you need to write, or because you hope someone will listen or because writing will mend something broken inside you or bring something back to life.
Joanne Harris
#35. I'm phobic about the idea of being constrained.
Joanne Harris
#36. The interesting thing about the Internet is that it has created a kind of alternative circle of friends for people.
Joanne Harris
#37. As authors, we all expect criticism from time to time, and we all have our ways of coping with unfriendly reviews.
Joanne Harris
#38. What is a writer of fiction but a liar with a licence?
Joanne Harris
#39. Work. Like pain, I sensed that this was an experience I would want to avoid as often as possible.
Joanne Harris
#41. He was the cleanest-cut comic-book schoolboy hero imaginable.
Joanne Harris
#42. For me, the magic of Hawaii comes from the stillness, the sea, the stars.
Joanne Harris
#43. 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
#44. I'm not sure I believe in the whole 'ghost-afterlife' thing, but I think places are marked by people who have been there.
Joanne Harris
#45. Does that mean I can't hammer him?' said Thor.
Heimdall scowled. 'Not yet,' he said.'When can I hammer him, please?' said Thor.
Joanne Harris
#46. We do not simply get showered with Hollywood money because we happened to write a little story about wizards one day. It's not winning the lottery. It's a real job, which real people do, and they have the same real problems as other real people.
Joanne Harris
#48. Old habits never die. And when you've once been in the business of granting wishes, the impulse never quite leaves you
Joanne Harris
#49. Some areas of technology really don't interest me at all, but I welcome anything that makes life easier instead of harder.
Joanne Harris
#50. If you were to be stranded on a desert island, what three items would you take? I gave this frivolous answer: A cat, a hat and a piece of string.
Joanne Harris
#51. It isn't just a village. The houses aren't just places to live. Everything belongs to everybody. Everyone belongs to everyone else. Even a single person can make a difference.
Joanne Harris
#52. Guilleaume left La Praline with a small bag of florentines in his pocket; before he had turned the corner of avenue des Francs Bourgeois I saw him stoop to offer one to the dog. A pat, a bark, a wagging of the short stubby tail. As I said, some people never have to think about giving.
Joanne Harris
#53. Life is what you celebrate. All of it. Even its end.
Joanne Harris
#54. That's Catholicism for you. A perpetual war between repression and excess.
Joanne Harris
#55. A little tantrum in real life seems so much bigger online.
Joanne Harris
#56. But if you could travel back through Time, and find yourself as you used to be, wouldn't you try, just once at least, to give her some kind of warning? Wouldn't you want to make things right?
Joanne Harris
#57. The Blessed Damozel essence of every dream and fairy story and legend and fear ...
Joanne Harris
#58. A spider brings good luck before midnight and bad luck after.
Joanne Harris
#59. CHURCH, not CHOCOLATE, is the TRUE MEANING of EASTER!!
Joanne Harris
#60. Somehow the anticipation of pain can be even more troubling, more a misery than the pain itself.
Joanne Harris
#61. You see, I do believe in miracles. I, who have passed through fire. I do believe.
Joanne Harris
#62. Some books you read. Some books you enjoy. But some books just swallow you up, heart and soul.
Joanne Harris
#63. I first saw the island of Noirmoutier when I was two weeks old. I think it's probably safe to say that I didn't fully appreciate it at the time; but I grew to love it as year after year I spent holidays there at my grandparents' cottage.
Joanne Harris
#64. If you want to know what's important to a culture, learn their language.
Joanne Harris
#65. Happiness. Simple as a glass of chocolate or tortuous as the heart. Bitter. Sweet. Alive.
Joanne Harris
#66. Fiction is a tower of glass built from a million tiny truths, grains of sand fused together to make a single, gleaming lie.
Joanne Harris
#67. And so Nat stood up and joined the group, and followed, and watched, and awaited his chance as the light of Chaos lit the plain and gods and demons marched to war.
Joanne Harris
#68. I don't believe God really cares what you eat, or what you wear, or whom you love. I think that if God made the stars, He must have a greater perspective.
Joanne Harris
#69. Your wolf is eating that man. I thought you should know.
Joanne Harris
#70. Magical properties were attributed to it. Its brew was sipped on the steps of sacrificial temples; its ecstasies were fierce and terrible. Is this what he fears? Corruption by pleasure, the subtle transubstantiation of the flesh into a vessel for debauch?
Joanne Harris
#71. The great thing about books is that you can end with a question mark.
Joanne Harris
#72. All right, Monsieur Jay,' she said, smiling. 'I'll tell them you're OK.
Joanne Harris
#73. In my dreams I gorge on chocolates, I roll in chocolates, and their texture is not brittle but soft as flesh, like a thousand mouths on my body, devouring me in fluttering small bites. To die beneath their tender gluttony seems the culmination of every temptation I have ever known.
Joanne Harris
#74. I sublimate different parts of my personality through my characters. Which is worrying, as some of them can be a bit nasty. I'm pleased the stuff on the page isn't inside me any more.
Joanne Harris
#75. Everything comes home, my mother used to say; every word spoken, every shadow cast, every footprint in the sand. It can't be helped; it's part of what makes us who we are.
Joanne Harris
#76. Divination is a means of telling ourselves what we already know.
Joanne Harris
#77. Death should be a celebration. Like a birthday. I want to go up like a rocket when my time comes, and fall down in a cloud of stars, and hear everyone go: ahh!
Joanne Harris
#78. The dead know everything, but don't give a damn.
Joanne Harris
#79. Anything based on ancient texts is difficult for a modern reader to get their head around.
Joanne Harris
#80. I'm politically inclined towards the left, but I don't like to be in anyone's gang; I'm a bit of a loose cannon.
Joanne Harris
#82. It's never too late to come home," he said, and pulled me gently, insistently toward him."All you have to do ... is stop moving away.
Joanne Harris
#83. I like autumn. The drama of it; the golden lion roaring through the back door of the year, shaking its mane of leaves. A dangerous time; of violent rages and deceptive calm, of fireworks in the pockets and conkers in the fist.
Joanne Harris
#84. Sometimes walking away is best. I should know. It's my specialty.
Joanne Harris
#85. I have an advanced degree in procrastination and another one in paranoia.
Joanne Harris
#86. I've never been very good at leaving things behind. I tried, but I have always left fragments of myself there too, like seeds awaiting their chance to grow.
Joanne Harris
#87. I don't think I've ever had a mentor. The closest thing is my friend Christopher Fowler, another writer. Chris kept me sane for a long time before I made it.
Joanne Harris
#88. I dream a lot, in colour and in sound and scent. Quite a few of my stories have come from dreams.
Joanne Harris
#89. Drunkeness, she told us in a rare moment of confidence, is a sin against the fruit, the tree, the wine itself. Wine, distilled and nurtured from bud into fruit; it deserves reverance. Joy. Gentleness.
(Page 194.)
Joanne Harris
#90. I find littering very annoying. It's a minor but also a major thing: a society that litters is one that also has so little respect for the environment and, consequently, other people. If we had clean streets, a lot of other things would be fixed almost effortlessly.
Joanne Harris
#91. If I'm going to die today, the least I can do is look fabulous while I'm doing it.
Joanne Harris
#92. I'm not fond of cities: the constant activity and swarms of people.
Joanne Harris
#93. At five in the morning the Loire is still and sumptuous with mist. The water is beautiful at that time of the day, cool and magically pale, the sandbanks rising like lost continents. The water smells of night, and here and there a spray of new sunlight makes mica shadows on the surface.
Joanne Harris
#94. Before you have children, you mostly think about the world in terms of yourself. And when you become a parent, the focus shifts to somebody else.
Joanne Harris
#95. Why can no one here think of anything but chocolates?
Joanne Harris
#96. We spoke French at home and I didn't know any English until I went to school. My mother was French and met my father when he visited France as a student on a teaching placement.
Joanne Harris
#97. If knowledge was power I had under my possession the entire school
Joanne Harris
#98. I've nothing against kids reading anything they please, but I do have a problem with pink books for girls and black books for boys.
Joanne Harris
#100. Loki was hurling fire runes and holding a running commentary on her battle, to which no one but him was listening to.
'And Thor gets in behind Frey and - WHAM! BOOM! That's got to hurt. And Loki SCORES! This boy's on FIRE!
Joanne Harris
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