Joanne Harris

"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."

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

"A thing named is a thing tamed."

"The right circumstances sometimes happen of their own accord, slyly, without fanfare, without warning. Layman's alchemy. . . . The magic of everyday things."

"I let it go. It's like swimming against the current. It exhausts you. After a while, whoever you are, you just have to let go, and the river brings you home."

Joanne Harris
"Some things can be both real and imaginary at the same time, . . . some lies can be true, . . . broken faith may be restored."

"The process of giving is without limits."

"I speak as I must and cannot be silent."

"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""

"Remember, it's the winners write the history books, and the losers get the leavings."

"Everything comes home, my mother used to say; every word spoken, every shadow cast, every footprint in the sand. It can't be helped; it's part of what makes us who we are. "

"A few hundred years ago there were no differences between magic and medicine."

"It's a feeling which tells me that any woman can be beautiful in the eyes of a man who loves her."

"That wind. I see it's blowing now. Furtive but commanding, it has dictated every move we've ever made. My mother felt it, and so do I - even here, even now - as it sweeps us like leaves into his backseat corner, dancing us to shreds against the stones. V'la l'bon vent, v'a l'joli vent. I though we'd silenced it for good. But the smallest thing can wake the wind@ a word, a sign, even a death. There's no such thing as a trivial thing. Everything costs; it all adds up until finally the balance shifts and we're gone again, back on the road, telling ourselves - well maybe next time"

"The real magic - the magic we'd lived with all our lives, my mother's magic of charms and cantrips, of salt by the door and a red silk sachet to placate the little gods - had turned sour on us that summer, somehow, like a spider that turns from good luck to bad at the stroke of midnight, spinning its web to catch our dreams. And for every little spell of charm, for every card dealt and every rune cast and every sign scratched against a doorway to divert the path of malchance, the wind just blew a little harder, tugging at our clothes, sniffing at us like a hungry dog, moving us here and moving us there."

"A man who casts no shadow isn't really a man at all."

"Drunkenness, she told us in a rare moment of confidence, is a sin against the fruit, the tree, the wine itself. Wine, distilled and nurtured from bud into fruit; it deserves reverence. Joy. Gentleness.

Joanne Harris

Karen Maezen Miller

"You don't have to wait for happiness, because there's no time but now to be happy. You don't have to go somewhere else, because there's no place but here to find it. You don't have to do something else, because there's nothing more to it. You don't have to get something else, because everything you already have is enough. You just have to be happy. ..."

Karen Maezen Miller

Stephenie Meyer

"It was more like my heart had grown, swollen up to twice its size in that moment. All that extra space, already filled."

Stephenie Meyer

Ayn Rand

"I regret nothing. There have been things I missed, but I ask no questions, because I have loved it, such as it has been, even the moments of emptiness, even the unanswered-and that I loved, that is the unanswered in my life."

Ayn Rand

Jeffrey Eugenides

"Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever. "

Jeffrey Eugenides

Haruki Murakami

"But who can say what's best? That's why you need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. My experience tells me that we get no more than one or two such chances in a life time, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives."

Haruki Murakami

On Friendship

"There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature."

Jane Austen

"It's the friends you can call up at 4 a.m. that matter."

Marlene Dietrich

"A friend is someone who knows the song in your heart, and can sing it back to you when you have forgotten the words."

Donna Roberts

"Life is an awful, ugly place to not have a best friend."

Sarah Dessen

"It takes much bravery to stand up to our enemies but we need as much bravery to stand up to our friends."

J.K. Rowling

"When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares."

Henri J.M. Nouwen

"I would rather walk with a friend in the dark, than alone in the light."

Helen Keller

"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."

J.R.R. Tolkien

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Rita Mae Brown

"The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four people is suffering from a mental illness. Look at your 3 best friends. If they're ok, then it's you."

Rita Mae Brown

Mark Twain

"Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life."

Mark Twain