The collection / 43 fragments

The living archive

Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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43 results · Page 1 of 2Play this collection ▷

01Undated

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

Joanne Harris / quote

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02Undated

I believe that being happy is the only important thing. Happiness. Simple as a glass of chocolate or torturous as the heart. Bitter. Sweet. Alive.

Joanne Harris / quote

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03Undated

No point carrying useless ballast. It won't change a thing.

Joanne Harris / quote

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04Undated

The dead know everything but they don't give a damn.

Joanne Harris / quote

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05Undated

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

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06Undated

A man may plant a tree for a number of reasons. Perhaps he likes trees. Perhaps he wants shelter. Or perhaps he knows that someday he may need the firewood.

Joanne Harris / quote

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07Undated

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

Joanne Harris / quote

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08Undated

Well, that's history for you, folks. Unfair, untrue and for the most part written by folk who weren't even there.

Joanne Harris / quote

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09Undated

A named thing is a tamed thing.

Joanne Harris / quote

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10Undated

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 / quote

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11Undated

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.

Joanne Harris / quote

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12Undated

Gods? Don't let that impress you. Anyone can be a god if they have enough worshippers. You don't even have to have powers anymore. In my time I've seen theatre gods, gladiator gods, even storyteller gods - you people see gods everywhere. Gives you an excuse for not thinking for yourselves.God is just a word. Like Fury. like demon, Just words people use for things they don't understand. Reverse it and you get dog. It's just as appropriate.

Joanne Harris / quote

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13Undated

And yet, it was still a performance. Odin and I both knew it. It was a kind of play, a dream of how things might have been if he and I had been capable of trusting each other for a change. And so we hunted, and sang, and laughed, and told heavily edited stories of the good old days, while each of us watched the other and wondered when the knife would fall.

Joanne Harris / quote

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14Undated

There was something about total loyalty, uncritical devotion, endless patience, perpetual forgiveness and the general inability to believe that a loved one could ever do anything wrong that, frankly, just gave him the creeps.

Joanne Harris / quote

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15Undated

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.

Joanne Harris / quote

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16Undated

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

Joanne Harris / quote

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17Undated

A black cat crossed my path, and I stopped to dance around it widdershins and to sing the

Joanne Harris / quote

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18Undated

We didn’t see anyone that day. We had no expectations. Everything was spontaneous. There wasn’t a single moment of stress. We laughed like crazy all afternoon – though I couldn’t tell you what about. And there was definitely something in the air – call it magic if you like – because that was the happiest Christmas any of us could remember, which makes me think that perhaps, like luck, magic is something we can make for ourselves. It isn’t something you can buy. It doesn’t come as standard. And you don’t need to plan, or to overspend, or to wrack your brains trying to come up with some extraordinary way to celebrate. Because sometimes it’s the little things that bring us the greatest pleasure.

Joanne Harris / quote

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19Undated

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 / quote

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20Undated

For a time, then, we stay. For a time. Till the changes.

Joanne Harris / quote

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21Undated

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

Joanne Harris / quote

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22Undated

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

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23Undated

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 / quote

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24Undated

There's also a lot of random stuff about poetry, flowers and lute music, plus kissing and cuddling (lots of this), wearing similar outfits, talking incessantly about the current object of devotion, and generally losing one's faculties.

Joanne Harris / quote

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