Quotes from Joanne Harris

Knowledge is currency here....

Anything that can be dreamed is true.

You see, I do believe in miracles. I, who have passed through fire. I do believe.

There's an old Northlands saying that goes like this: When lies don't help. try telling the truth. Loki knew it well, of course, but preferred his own version, which was: When lies don't help, tell better lies.

Polite contempt. The barbed and poisonous weapon of the righteous.

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.

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.

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.

This is something different again. A feeling of peace. The feeling you get when a recipe turns out perfectly right, a perfectly risen souffle, a flawless sauce hollandaise. It's a feeling which tells me that any woman can be beautiful in the eyes of a man who loves her.

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.

Even the damned can dream - infact, it's part of their torment. To escape, even for a second or two, to forget reality and drift, only to be yanked back into the waking world like a fish caught on a line... Yes. In some ways that's even worse than to have no relief at all. That second of two, on awakening, when anything still seems possible

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

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?

The air is hot and rich with the scent of chocolate. Quite unlike the white powdery chocolate I knew as a boy, this has a throaty richness like the perfumed beans from the coffee stall on the market, a redolence of amaretto and tiramisù, a smoky, burned flavor that enters my mouth somehow and makes it water. There is a silver jug of the stuff on the counter, from which a vapor rises. I recall that I have not breakfasted this morning.

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.

No one looks at us. We might as well be invisible; or clothing marks us as strangers, transients. They are polite, so polite; no one stares at us.

When the going gets tough, choose your cliché.

Not that a promise means much to a demon - or a god.

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.

At such times I feel I could die for love of her, my little stranger, my heart swelling dangerously so that the only release is to run too, my red coat flapping around my shoulders like wings, my hair a comet's tail in the patchy blue sky.

We leave no trace as we pass on. Ghostlike, we cast no shadow.

If knowledge was power I had under my possession the entire school

Fiction is a tower of glass built from a million tiny truths, grains of sand fused together to make a single, gleaming lie.

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.