“Happiness. Simple as a glass of chocolate or tortuous as the heart. Bitter. Sweet. Alive.”
― Joanne Harris, quote from Chocolat
“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, quote from Chocolat
“Places have their own characters. . . . But the people begin to look the same.”
― Joanne Harris, quote from Chocolat
“The process of giving is without limits.”
― Joanne Harris, quote from Chocolat
“I sell dreams, small comforts, sweet harmless temptations to bring down a multitude of saints crashing among the hazels and nougatines”
― Joanne Harris, quote from Chocolat
“To be closed from everything, and yet to feel, to think...This is the truth of hell, stripped of its gaudy medievalisms. This loss of contact.”
― Joanne Harris, quote from Chocolat
“A black cat crossed my path, and I stopped to dance around it widdershins and to sing the rhyme,
Ou va-ti mistigri?
Passe sans faire de mai ici.”
― Joanne Harris, quote from Chocolat
“Places do not lose their identity, however far one travels. It is the heart that begins to erode over time. The face in the hotel mirror seems blurred some mornings, as if by too many casual looks. By ten the sheets will be laundered, the carpet swept. The names on the hotel registers change as we pass. We leave no trace as we pass on. Ghostlike, we cast no shadow.”
― Joanne Harris, quote from Chocolat
“I liked her better for showing a little spirit.”
― Joanne Harris, quote from Chocolat
“A spider brings good luck before midnight and bad luck after.”
― Joanne Harris, quote from Chocolat
“The wind always brings us back to the same wall”
― Joanne Harris, quote from Chocolat
“Divination is a means of telling ourselves what we already know.”
― Joanne Harris, quote from Chocolat
“I carried recipes in my head like maps.”
― Joanne Harris, quote from Chocolat
“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.”
― Joanne Harris, quote from Chocolat
“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.”
― Joanne Harris, quote from Chocolat
“I envy the table its scars, the scorch marks caused by the hot bread tins. I envy its calm sense of time, and I wish I could say: I did this five years ago. I made this mark, this ring caused by a wet coffee cup, this cigarette burn, this ladder of cuts against the wood’s coarse grain. This is where Anouk carved her initials, the year she was six years old, this secret place behind the table leg. I did this on a warm day seven summers ago with the carving knife. Do you remember? Do you remember the summer the river ran dry? Do you remember? I envy the table’s calm sense of place. It has been here a long time. It belongs.”
― Joanne Harris, quote from Chocolat
“Why can no one here think of anything but chocolates?”
― Joanne Harris, quote from Chocolat
“For a time, then, we stay. For a time. Till the changes.”
― Joanne Harris, quote from Chocolat
“he is the kind of man who breakes biscuits in two and saves the other half for later”
― Joanne Harris, quote from Chocolat
“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, quote from Chocolat
“Polite contempt. The barbed and poisonous weapon of the righteous.”
― Joanne Harris, quote from Chocolat
“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.”
― Joanne Harris, quote from Chocolat
“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.”
― Joanne Harris, quote from Chocolat
“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, quote from Chocolat
“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, quote from Chocolat
“Old habits never die. And when you've once been in the business of granting wishes, the impulse never quite leaves you”
― Joanne Harris, quote from Chocolat
“You see, I do believe in miracles. I, who have passed through fire. I do believe.”
― Joanne Harris, quote from Chocolat
“We leave no trace as we pass on. Ghostlike, we cast no shadow.”
― Joanne Harris, quote from Chocolat
Joanne Harris
Born place: in Barnsley, The United Kingdom
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“I think everyone may have underestimated your mother’s love for you. Me included.”
― Michael J. Sullivan, quote from The Rose and the Thorn
“That’s what I learned from my father and what I loved learning from him: that you do what you have to do.”
― Philip Roth, quote from Indignation
“And when they asked us where we were from, we exchanged glances and smiled with the shyness of child brides. They said, Africa? We nodded yes. What part of Africa? We smiled. Is it that part where vultures wait for famished children to die? We smiled. Where the life expectancy is thirty-five years? We smiled? Is is there where dissidents shove AK-47s between women's legs? We smiled. Where people run about naked? We smiled. That part where they massacred each other? We smiled. Is it where the old president rigged the election and people were tortured and killed and a whole bunch of them put in prison and all, there where they are dying of cholera - oh my God, yes, we've seen your country; it's been on the news.”
― NoViolet Bulawayo, quote from We Need New Names
“But that is the dual gift of love, isn’t it? The joy of greeting and the sorrow of good-bye.”
― Patricia Briggs, quote from Dead Heat
“It's hardly Mr. Clay's fault that you're an idiot.”
― Jen Turano, quote from After a Fashion
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VenomBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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