CHOCOLAT - JOANNE HARRIS

Chocolat - Pg 289

There would be time for grieving later. For the moment, simple wonder; at myself lying naked in the grass, at the silent man beside me, at the immensity above and the immensity within. 

Chocolat - Pg 272

Of course it might have been one of her delusions. There were others, like the snake under the bedclothes and the woman in the mirrors. It could have been make-believe. So much of my mother's life was just that. And besides--after so long, what did it matter? 

Chocolat - Pg 269

I lie awake almost every night now, sugarplums dancing before my eyes. Anouk sleeps in her new attic bedroom, and I dream awake, doze, wake adream, doze, until my eyelids glitter with sleeplessness and the room pitches around me like a rolling ship. 

Chocolat - Pg 235

I tell myself--in the small hours when everything seems possible and my nerves shriek like the unoiled hinges of the weathervane--that my fear is irrational. 

Chocolat - Pg 222

I feel the insidious creeping of doubt in my mind, and my mouth fills at the memory of its perfume, like cream and marshmallow and burnt sugar and the heady mingling of cognac and fresh-ground cocoa beans. It is the scent of a woman's hair, just where the nape joins the skull's tender hollow, the scent of ripe apricots in the sun, of warm brioche and cinnamon rolls, lemon tea and lily of the valley. It is an incense diffused on the wind and unfurling softly like a banner of revolt, this devil's spoor, not sulfurous as we were taught as children but this lightest, most evocative of perfumes, combined essence of a thousand spices, making the head  ring and the spirit soar. I find myself standing outside St. Jérôme's with my head lifted into the wind, straining to catch a trace of that perfume. It suffuses my dreams, and I awake sweating and famished. In my dreams I gorge on chocolates, I roll in chocolates, and their texture is not brittle but soft as flesh, like a thousand mouths on my body, devouring me in fluttering small bites. To die beneath their tender gluttony seems the culmination of every temptation I have ever known. 

Chocolat - Pg 207

"Death should be a celebration," she told me. "Like a birthday. I want to go up like a rocket when my time comes, and fall down in a cloud of stars, and hear everyone go: Ahhhh!"

Chocolat - Pg 185

Armande came in early this morning for gossip and chocolate. 

Chocolat - Pg 179

   "You've seen so much." Her voice was encious and a little awed. "And you're still so young."   "I'm nearly the same age as you."   She shook her head. "I'm a thousand years old." She gave a smile that was both sweet and wistful. "I'd like to be an adventurer," she said. "To follow the sun with nothing but a single suitcase, to have no idea at all of where I might be tomorrow." 

Chocolat - Pg 178

I envy the table its scars, the scorch marks caused by the hot bread tins. I envy its calm sense of time, and 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 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? 

Chocolat - Pg 172

   "And what--if it isn't an impertinent question--what do you believe?"   Magic carpet rides, rune magic, Ali Baba and visions of the Holy Mother, astral travel and the future in dregs of a glass of red wine...   Florida? Disneyland? The Everglades? What about it, chérie? What about it, hein?   Buddha. Frodo's journey into Mordor. The transubstantiation of the sacrament. Dorothy and Toto. The Easter Bunny. Space aliens. The Thing in the closet. The Resurrection and the Life at the turn of a card... I've believed them all at one time or another. Or pretended to. Or pretended not to.    Whatever you like, Mother. Whatever makes you happy.    And now? What do I believe right now? "I believe that being happy is the only important thing," I told him at last.    Happiness. Simple as a glass of chocolate or tortuous as the heart. Bitter. Sweet. Alive. 

Chocolat - Pg 164

Is this temptation, pére? I tell myself that I resisted it, that my inner strength defeated it, that my prayer--please oh please oh please oh please--was one of deliverance, not of desire. 

Chocolat - Pg 163

Her face is open, delighted. The sound of her voice across the water--her laughter mingling with that of the others-- is alluring, vibrant with humor and affection. I find myself wondering what my own voice would sound like among those others, my own laughter meshed with hers, and the night is suddenly very lonely, very cold, very empty. 

Chocolat - Pg 148

The place haunts me. Barely different from the way it was twenty years ago, there is a sly stillness to the place, an air of anticipation. Curtains twitch at grimy windows as I walk by. I seem to hear a low, continuous laughter coming at me across the quiet spaces. 

Chocolat - Pg 147

A fire, you said, mon pére, a fire left untended by the drunkard and his slattern who owned that boat, the flames spreading in the dry electric air until the river was dancing with it. An accident. 

Chocolat - Pg 146

The first green of the spring corn gives the land a mellower look than you and I are used to. At a distance it seems lush--a few early drones stitch the air above its swaying, giving the fields a somnolent appearance. But we know that in two months' time all this will be burned to stubble by the sun, the earth bared and cracked to a red glaze through which even the thistles are reluctant to grow. A hot wind scours what is left of the country, bringing with it drought, and in its wake a stinking stillness. 

Chocolat - Pg 144

I wonder as I listen to the birds--a single craw-craw at first, then a full congregation of them--was this what she fled? Not her own death, but the thousands of tiny intersections of her life with others, the broken connections, the links in spite of themselves, the responsibilities? Did we spend all those years running from our loves, our friendships, the casual words uttered in passing that can alter the course of a lifetime? 

Chocolat - Pg 142

   But even though she laughed with me, rocking with merriment in her chair, what I recall now is not her laughter but what I glimpsed behind the laughter: that look of giddy abandon, desperate glee.   And it was only later, late into the night when I awoke sweating from some dark, half-forgotten nightmare, that I remembered where I had seen that look before.   How about Florida, sweetheart? The Everglades? The Keys? How about Disneyland, chérie, or New York, Chicago, the Grand Canyon, Chinatown, New Mexico, the Rocky Mountains?   But with Armande there was none of my mother's fear, none of her delicate parrying and wrangling with death, none of her mad hit-and-run flights of fantasy into the unknown. With Armande there was only the hunger, the desire, the terrible awareness of time. 

Chocolat - Pg 135

For five minutes I stand alone in the square with my arms held out, feeling the wind in my hair. I have forgotten to bring a coat and my red skirt billows out around me. I am a kite, feeling the wind, rising in an instant above the church tower, rising above myself. For a moment I am disoriented, seeing the scarlet figure below in the square, at once here and there.

Chocolat - Pg 110

"Read me your favorite poem," she says.

From the kitchen, as I pour chocolate into two tall glasses, as I stir in cream and kahlua, as I make enough noise with pots and bottles to give the illusion of privacy, I hear his voice raised, stilted at first, then gaining rhythm and confidence. I cannot make out the words, but from a distance it sounds like prayer or invective.

I notice that when he reads the boy does not stutter.