Quotes from Chocolat

Joanne Harris ·  306 pages

Rating: (97.1K votes)


“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


About the author

Joanne Harris
Born place: in Barnsley, The United Kingdom
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Popular quotes

“We walked almost a mile before we came out of the woods atop a ridge overlooking a broad green meadow that looked almost artificial in its pastoral sweetness, like someone had transplanted it from a movie set in New Zealand. Fluffy clouds of sheep dotted the green, and we were far enough away that they looked a little dingy but not filthy—a beautiful trick of distance. (Sheep are some of the nastiest creatures in the world. They’re smelly, stupid things that have been bred to have way too much hair, meaning that all their bodily fluids and drippings get felted right into the wool. If not for bleach, we’d all walk around covered in sheep shit all the time. Agriculture is not a pretty thing.)”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Pocket Apocalypse


“Finge went on. “There are some things, however, they must not know. Prime among them, of course, is the manner in which we alter Reality when necessary. The insecurity such knowledge would arouse would be most harmful. It is always necessary to breed out of Reality any factors that might lead to such knowledge and we have never been troubled with it.”
― Isaac Asimov, quote from Fim da Eternidade


“We memorialize our past. Everything seems better in a memory.”
― Renee Carlino, quote from Before We Were Strangers


“Negroes were drafted, white men weren’t; the poor were hauled off to war, the rich weren’t; the stupid were shot at, the bright boys weren’t.”
― James A. Michener, quote from Sáu Người Đi Khắp Thế Gian (Quyển 1)


“Ironically, the tattoo represents the opposite for me today. It reminds me that it's important to let yourself be vulnerable, to lose control and make a mistake. It reminds me that, as Whitman would say, I contain multitudes and I always will. I'm a level-one introvert who headlined Madison Square Garden—and was the first woman comic to do so. I'm the ‘overnight success’ who's worked her ass off every single waking moment for more than a decade. I used to shoplift the kind of clothing that people now request I wear to give them free publicity. I'm the SLUT or SKANK who's only had one one-night stand. I'm a ‘plus-size’ 6 on a good day, and a medium-size 10 on an even better day. I've suffered the identical indignities of slinging rib eyes for a living and hustling laughs for cash. I'm a strong, grown-ass woman who's been physically, sexually, and emotionally abused by men and women I trusted and cared about. I've broken hearts and had mine broken, too.
Beautiful, ugly, funny, boring, smart or not, my vulnerability is my ultimate strength. There's nothing anyone can say about me that's more permanent, damaging, or hideous than the statement I have forever tattooed upon myself. I'm proud of this ability to laugh at myself—even if everyone can see my tears, just like they can see my dumb, senseless, whack, lame lower back tattoo.”
― Amy Schumer, quote from The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo


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