Top 160 Joanne Harris Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Joanne Harris

Featured in: Enjoy Life Quotes

2. “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.”

— Joanne Harris

3. “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.”

— Joanne Harris

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

— Joanne Harris

5. “A problem shared is a problem solved.”

— Joanne Harris

6. “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.”

— Joanne Harris

7. “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

8. “I’d rather be a freak than a clone.”

— Joanne Harris

9. “If you want to know what’s important to a culture, learn their language.”

— Joanne Harris

10. “The process of writing is a little like madness, a kind of possession not altogether benign.”

— Joanne Harris

11. “Change isn’t always comfortable, but it is a fact of life.”

— Joanne Harris

12. “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

13. “Remember, it’s the winners write the history books, and the losers get the leavings.”

— Joanne Harris

14. “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

15. “For me, the magic of Hawaii comes from the stillness, the sea, the stars.”

— Joanne Harris

16. “I think everybody has a secret life.”

— Joanne Harris

17. “I can write absolutely anywhere. All I need is a laptop.”

— Joanne Harris

18. “Sometimes survival is the worst alternative there is.”

— Joanne Harris

19. “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

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

— Joanne Harris

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

— Joanne Harris

22. “Online communities are an expression of loneliness.”

— Joanne Harris

23. “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

24. “A man who casts no shadow isn’t really a man at all.”

— Joanne Harris

25. “If only I had patience. If only I could sleep till spring. If only I were the hawthorn tree, too old to love, too wise to hate.”

— Joanne Harris

26. “I think if you are an outsider then you are an outsider always.”

— Joanne Harris

27. “The process of giving is without limits.”

— Joanne Harris

28. “Sometimes walking away is best. I should know. It’s my specialty.”

— Joanne Harris

29. “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.”

— Joanne Harris

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

— Joanne Harris

31. “A named thing is a tamed thing.”

— Joanne Harris

32. “I’m incapable of hiding my feelings when I’m around someone I don’t like.”

— Joanne Harris

33. “I have an advanced degree in procrastination and another one in paranoia.”

— Joanne Harris

34. “From a very young age my mother persuaded me that I could write for fun, but I had to have a proper job – very good advice.”

— Joanne Harris

Featured in: Fun Quotes

35. “I’m phobic about the idea of being constrained.”

— Joanne Harris

36. “Knowledge is currency here...”

— Joanne Harris

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

— Joanne Harris

38. “Clones fit in. Freaks stand out. Ask me which one I prefer.”

— Joanne Harris

39. “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

40. “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

41. “I am not at all a chocoholic. I would rather eat anchovy toast.”

— Joanne Harris

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

— Joanne Harris

43. “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

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

— Joanne Harris

45. “All those moments, those memories. Everything that we are, compressed in just two or three kilos of paper – the weight of a human heart.”

— Joanne Harris

46. “The wind always brings us back to the same wall.”

— Joanne Harris

47. “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

48. “This isn’t the first time the world has come to an end, and it won’t be the last either.”

— Joanne Harris

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

49. “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

50. “A spider brings good luck before midnight and bad luck after.”

— Joanne Harris