Quotes by Joanne Harris

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

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.

No point carrying useless ballast. It wont change a thing.

The dead know everything but they dont give a damn.

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

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.

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

Well, thats history for you, folks. Unfair, untrue and for the most part written by folk who werent even there.

A named thing is a tamed thing.

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.

Im 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 hes chained underground, awaiting Last Times and stinking of mead.

Gods? Dont let that impress you. Anyone can be a god if they have enough worshippers. You dont even have to have powers anymore. In my time Ive 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 dont understand. Reverse it and you get dog. Its just as appropriate.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

The advantage of travel is that after a while you begin to realize that wherever you go, most people arent really all that much different.

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