Top 160 Joanne Harris Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Like a flower she grows towards the light, without thinking or examining the process which moves her to do so. I wish I could do the same.”

— Joanne Harris

102. “I don’t tend to do category fiction very well. One of my problems when I was starting off was that publishers were hesitant to handle my books because they were never sure what I was going to do next.”

— Joanne Harris

103. “Love not often, but forever.”

— Joanne Harris

104. “Odin’s empire was built on bluff and the knowledge that no one dared to strike, but our enemies were like wolves around a bonfire: at bay, but let them scent blood, just once, and they’d be on us before we knew it.”

— Joanne Harris

105. “I am fascinated by how people eat and what it reveals about them.”

— Joanne Harris

106. “Food is the thing that unites us all, that brings us back together. Food is the thing we can provide when there is nothing else we can do. That’s why we serve it at funerals. To remind us that Life always goes on.”

— Joanne Harris

107. “My mother marked the events of her life with recipes, dishes of her own invention or interpretations of old favorites. Food was her nostalgia, her celebration, its nurture and preparation the sole outlet for her creativity.”

— Joanne Harris

108. “There’s good news and slightly less good news.”

— Joanne Harris

109. “If you want something you can have it, but you have to do some work. It’s the ethic my mother brought me up with.”

— Joanne Harris

110. “I made the coffee myself in Armande’s curious small kitchen with its cast-iron range and low ceiling. Everything is clean there, but the one tiny window looks onto the river, giving the light a greenish underwater look. Hanging from the dark, unpainted beams are bunches of dry herbs in their muslin sachets. On the whitewashed walls, copper pans hang from hooks. The door- like all the doors in the house- has a hole cut into the base to allow free passage to her cats.”

— Joanne Harris

111. “We’re gods, not saints. Everyone lies. Everyone cheats. Everyone scores off everyone else.”

— Joanne Harris

112. “Magical properties were attributed to it. Its brew was sipped on the steps of sacrificial temples; its ecstasies were fierce and terrible. Is this what he fears? Corruption by pleasure, the subtle transubstantiation of the flesh into a vessel for debauch?”

— Joanne Harris

113. “Clever folk aren’t popular, by and large. They arouse suspicion. They don’t fit in. They can be useful, as I proved on a number of occasions, but among the general population there’s always a sense of vague mistrust, as if the very qualities that make them indispensable also make them dangerous.”

— Joanne Harris

114. “There she goes. How strange she is: my winter child; my changeling. Wild as an armful of birds, she flies everywhere in an instant. There is no keeping her inside, no making her sit quietly. She has never been like other girls, never like other children. Rosette is a force of nature, like the jackdaws that sit on the steeple and laugh, like a fall of unseasonal snow, like the blossom on the wind.”

— Joanne Harris

115. “You priests. You’re all the same. You think fasting helps you think about God, when anyone who can cook would tell you that fasting just makes you think about food.”

— Joanne Harris

116. “I love it when my books cause controversy, when people argue violently about the ending.”

— Joanne Harris

117. “Think about it for a while. How can you hope to have any friends when you spy on everything they do? How can you enjoy the present when you can see the future? Most of all, how can you love when you know Death lies in waiting?”

— Joanne Harris

118. “All words have power, of course, but names are the most potent of all, which is why the gods had so many.”

— Joanne Harris

119. “I liked her better for showing a little spirit.”

— Joanne Harris

120. “I happen to know that history is nothing but a spin and metaphor, which is what all yarns are made up of, when you strip them down to the underlay. And what makes a hit or a myth, of course, is how that story is told, and by whom.”

— Joanne Harris

121. “He was the cleanest-cut comic-book schoolboy hero imaginable.”

— Joanne Harris

122. “I guessed he’d never experienced revenge, a threesome, or Sigyn’s jam tarts.”

— Joanne Harris

123. “And if I never have a veil, or a golden ring on my hand, I will still have you, my love, and that will be enough for me. Sleep well, love, and dream of me. And know that, if I were to live for a thousand years, there would still not be enough nights in which to dream of you.”

— Joanne Harris

124. “At five in the morning the Loire is still and sumptuous with mist. The water is beautiful at that time of the day, cool and magically pale, the sandbanks rising like lost continents. The water smells of night, and here and there a spray of new sunlight makes mica shadows on the surface.”

— Joanne Harris

125. “What is a writer of fiction but a liar with a licence?”

— Joanne Harris

126. “I carried recipes in my head like maps.”

— Joanne Harris

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

— Joanne Harris

128. “All schools have their skeletons. St Oswald’s is no exception. Most of the time, we try our best to keep them in the closet. But this time, the only recourse we have is to throw open all the closets, light as many bulbs as we can and catch the vermin as it comes out.”

— Joanne Harris

129. “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.”

— Joanne Harris

130. “I’ll be your handmaid, Thor,” I said. “Don’t worry, I won’t steal your thunder. You’ll make a gorgeous bride.” Thor growled.”

— Joanne Harris

131. “So much of his life seemed to be like this now, a blur of days without anything to define them from each other, like episodes of a soap he watched out of habit, even though none of the characters interested him.”

— Joanne Harris

132. “The advantage of travel is that after a while you begin to realize that wherever you go, most people aren’t really all that much different.”

— Joanne Harris

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

— Joanne Harris

134. “I have a tendency to pick up my own challenges. The more difficult something it is, the more I want to try it.”

— Joanne Harris

135. “I’ve nothing against kids reading anything they please, but I do have a problem with pink books for girls and black books for boys.”

— Joanne Harris

136. “I like literature that you respond to in some way. You laugh, you cry, you turn the light on – that’s great, it’s eliciting a response by proxy.”

— Joanne Harris

137. “Call me cynical if you like. But it all sounds a bit too convenient. The Authorized Version of events leaves out a number of details, which Creationists seem content to ignore. I personally have my doubts – not least about the giant cow – although even now you have to beware of how you express these sentiments.”

— Joanne Harris

138. “Most problems can be solved through cake.”

— Joanne Harris

139. “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.”

— Joanne Harris

140. “Anything that can be dreamed is true.”

— Joanne Harris

141. “A little tantrum in real life seems so much bigger online.”

— Joanne Harris

142. “Wine talks; ask anyone. The oracle at the street corner; the uninvited guest at the wedding feast; the holy fool. It ventriloquizes. It has a million voices. It unleashes the tongue, teasing out secrets you never meant to tell, secrets you never even knew. It shouts, rants, whispers. It speaks of great plans, tragic loves, and terrible betrayals. It screams with laughter. It chuckles softly to itself. It weeps in front of its own reflection. It revives summers long past and memories best forgotten. Every bottle a whiff of other times, other places, everyone... a humble miracle.”

— Joanne Harris

143. “The road to adulthood is filled with contradictions, and I was still young enough to half believe the lies with which that road is paved.”

— Joanne Harris

144. “And so Nat stood up and joined the group, and followed, and watched, and awaited his chance as the light of Chaos lit the plain and gods and demons marched to war.”

— Joanne Harris

145. “But with power comes responsibility. And with responsibility comes fear. And with fear comes violence. And with violence comes Chaos...”

— Joanne Harris

146. “Clever folk aren’t popular, by and large. They arouse suspicion. They don’t fit in.”

— Joanne Harris

147. “For a teller of tales will never die, but will live on in stories – for as long as there are folk to listen.”

— Joanne Harris

148. “For a moment something almost as rare as the sight that they had just witnessed occurred: Loki was totally lost for words.”

— Joanne Harris

149. “It’s too early for strawberries. But the clearing is filled with their leaves and their little white flowers, like fallen stars. The wishing well was covered, too, so that only someone who knew it was there would have really noticed it. It looks like a barrow under the green; somewhere fairies or goblins might live.”

— Joanne Harris

150. “A devil doesn’t act through evil, but through weakness...”

— Joanne Harris