Quotes from Joanne Harris

Work. Like pain, I sensed that this was an experience I would want to avoid as often as possible.

A spider brings good luck before midnight and bad luck after.

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.

But I rather thought--I mean, I heard you'd killed Balder the Fair. I never did, snapped Loki crossly. Well, no one ever proved I did. What happened to the presumption of innocence? Besides, he was supposed to be invulnerable. Was it my fault that he wasn't?

A man who casts no shadow isn't really a man at all.

Loki, that's me. Loki, the Light-Bringer, the misunderstood, the elusive, the handsome and modest hero of this particular tissue of lies.

I liked her better for showing a little spirit.

I carried recipes in my head like maps.

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

The wind always brings us back to the same wall

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

An apple a day keeps the doctor away. No one's immune to bribery.

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

They tell you revenge isn't worth it. I say there's nothing finer.

Like a domestic cat, purring on the sofa by day, but by night, a strutting queen, a natural killer, disdainful of her other life.

There were a few compensations to having corporeal Aspect. Food (jam tarts were my favourites); drink (mostly wine and mead); setting things on fire; sex (although I was still extremely confused by all the taboos surrounding this - no animals, no siblings, no men, no married women, no demons - frankly, it was amazing to me that anyone had sex at all, with so many rules against it).

More. Oh that word. That deceptive word. That eater of lives; that malcontent.

There's good news and slightly less good news.

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.

Sticks and stones may break my bones', as they say in the Middle Worlds, but with the right words you can build a world and make yourself the king of it.

What is a writer of fiction but a liar with a licence?

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.

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.

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.