Joanne Harris citations

“Some books you read. Some books you enjoy. But some books just swallow you up, heart and soul.”

“It's a feeling which tells me that any woman can be beautiful in the eyes of a man who loves her.”

“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.”

“Divination is a means of telling ourselves what we already know.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“She always had that about her, that look of otherness, of eyes that see things much too far, and of thoughts that wander off the edge of the world.”

“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.”

“I'd rather be a freak than a clone.”

“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!”

“Love not often, but forever.”

“Places have their own characters…. But the people begin to look the same.”

“A thing named is a thing tamed.”

“Life is what you celebrate. All of it. Even its end.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“The process of giving is without limits.”

“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.”

“I speak as I must and cannot be silent.”

“I sell dreams, small comforts, sweet harmless temptations to bring down a multitude of saints crashing among the hazels and nougatines”

“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.”

“If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.”

“Some things can be both real and imaginary at the same time,… some lies can be true,… broken faith may be restored.”

“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.”

“To be closed from everything, and yet to feel, to think… This is the truth of hell, stripped of its gaudy medievalisms. This loss of contact.”

“The right circumstances sometimes happen of their own accord, slyly, without fanfare, without warning. Layman's alchemy…. The magic of everyday things.”

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