Chocolat Quotes

“Happiness. Simple as a glass of chocolate or tortuous as the heart. Bitter. Sweet. Alive.”
― Joanne Harris, 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, Chocolat

“Places have their own characters. . . . But the people begin to look the same.”
― Joanne Harris, Chocolat

“Life is what you celebrate. All of it. Even its end.”
― Joanne Harris, Chocolat

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

“The process of giving is without limits.”
― Joanne Harris, 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, 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, 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, Chocolat

“A spider brings good luck before midnight and bad luck after.”
― Joanne Harris, Chocolat

“I liked her better for showing a little spirit.”
― Joanne Harris, Chocolat

“I carried recipes in my head like maps.”
― Joanne Harris, Chocolat

“Divination is a means of telling ourselves what we already know.”
― Joanne Harris, Chocolat

“The wind always brings us back to the same wall”
― Joanne Harris, 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, 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, Chocolat

“Why can no one here think of anything but chocolates?”
― Joanne Harris, 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, Chocolat

“For a time, then, we stay. For a time. Till the changes.”
― Joanne Harris, 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, Chocolat

“he is the kind of man who breakes biscuits in two and saves the other half for later”
― Joanne Harris, Chocolat

“Knowledge is currency here....”
― Joanne Harris, Chocolat

“You see, I do believe in miracles. I, who have passed through fire. I do believe.”
― Joanne Harris, Chocolat

“Polite contempt. The barbed and poisonous weapon of the righteous.”
― Joanne Harris, 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, 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, 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, Chocolat

“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, 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, Chocolat

“I don't think that white collar gives you sole right of access to the divine.”
― Joanne Harris, Chocolat