Joanne Harris Quotes

Americans continue to rapidly homogenize ourselves into a neutered oblivion. For a country founded on the protection of the unique, we relish our sameness.

I'm afraid that everything will get homogenized and be the same.

What works in Chattanooga now works in the Sixth Arrondissement of Paris; it’s a little sad.

It baffles me that everything is so homogenized, because the world isn't, and yet we continue to support things that are so incredibly milquetoast.

[The 'corporate takeover of people's lives'] also accounts for a lot of homogenization of culture. There are fast food restaurants everywhere. Every place tastes the same.

Our culture has made us all the same. No one is truly white or black or rich, anymore. We all want the same. Individually, we are nothing.

I go out in New York, and I think, boy, you can look at someone and pretty much determine their zip code. Everyone seems to want to conform. I wonder, are they all just button-pressers, on the Internet all day long? I don't know.

Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents.

Everything's getting homogenized. It seems to me like music and behavior and everything else is getting homogenized.

…It’s like a spiral: They keep making everything more basic so it will appeal to everyone. And gradually, everyone gets used to everything being basic, so we get less and less varied as people, more simple. So the corps make everything even simpler. And it goes on and on.

You are someone who is different, but who wants to be the same as everyone else. And that in my view is a serious illness. God chose you to be different. Why are you disappointing God with this kind of attitude?

Console yourself, dear man and brother; whatever you may be sure of, be sure at least of this, that you are dreadfully like other people. Human nature has a much greater genius for sameness than for originality.

She had for so many years been trying to be like other people, that she was now like nothing in heaven or earth.

Humanity is OK, but 99% of people are boring idiots.

Why change? Everyone has his own style. When you have found it, you should stick to it.

Portraying this character [Diwata] has really given me an opportunity to get in touch with that side of myself, which I haven't been for a few years. And I do know what it's like to be different from people around you and not fit into the prototypical mold of what America sort of thinks a girl "should be."

One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.

I am bored in France because everyone resembles Voltaire.

People come to New York to be different, but I go to Starbucks to be the same.

I think a lot of snowflakes are alike...and I think a lot of people are alike too.

The price of being oneself is so high and involves so much ruthlessness toward others (or what looks like ruthlessness in our duty-bound culture) that very few people can afford it.

Having someone who looks like us but thinks like them is worse than having no one at all.

Just being ourselves is the biggest fear of humans. We have learned to live our life trying to satisfy other people's demands. We have learned to live by other people's points of view because of the fear of not being accepted and of not being good enough for someone else.

Where I grew up, it was all people who were black and Latino, people who look like me. Now I live in a neighborhood where very, very few people look like me.

I think it would be unfortunate if people in Saudi Arabia or some parts of the world influenced what we speak about in Denmark. [But] it's a fact of globalization, and we must consider it.