J.k. Rowling Quotes

At that moment, Harry fully understood for the first time why people said Dumbledore was the only wizard Voldemort had ever feared. The look upon Dumbledore's face as he stared down at the unconscious form of Mad-Eye moody was more terrible than Harry could have ever imagined. There was no benign smile upon Dumbledore's face, no twinkle in the eyes behind the spectacles. There was cold fury in every line of the ancient face; a sense of power radiated from Dumbledore as though he were giving off burning heat.

~ J.k. Rowling

And his knowledge remained woefully incomplete, Harry! That which Voldemort does not value, he takes no trouble to comprehend. Of house-elves and children's tales, of love, loyalty, and innocence, Voldemort knows and understands nothing. Nothing. That they all have a power beyond his own, a power beyond the reach of any magic, is a truth he has never grasped...

~ J.k. Rowling

Every witch or wizard with a wand has held in his or her hands more power than we will ever know. With the right spell or potion, they can fabricate love, travel through time, change physical form and even extinguish life.

~ J.k. Rowling

You do care, you feel as though you will bleed to death with the pain of it all.

~ J.k. Rowling

It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends.

~ J.k. Rowling

Kill me then,' panted Harry, who felt no fear at all, but only rage and contempt. 'Kill me like you killed him, you coward-'DON'T-' screamed Snape, and his face was suddenly demented, inhuman, as though he was in as much pain as the yelping, howling dog stuck in the house behind them- 'CALL ME A COWARD!

~ J.k. Rowling

Come on!' he muttered, staring about. 'Where are you? Dad, come on-- But no one came. Harry raised his head to look at the circle of dementors across the lake. One of them was lowering its hood. It was time for the rescuer to appear--but no one was coming to help this time-- And then it hit him--he understood. He hadn't seen his father--he had seen himself--... 'It was stupid, thinking it was him,' he (Harry) muttered. 'I mean, I knew he was dead.' 'You think the dead we loved ever truly leave us? You think that we don't recall them more clearly than ever in times of great trouble? Your father is alive in you, Harry, and shows himself most plainly when you have need of him. How else could you produce that particular Patronus? Prongs rode again last night.'... 'You know, Harry, in a way, you did see your father last night...You found him inside yourself.' And Dumbledore left the office, leaving Harry to his very confused thoughts.

~ J.k. Rowling

You do care. You care so much you feel as though you will bleed to death with the pain of it.

~ J.k. Rowling

He had a powerful kind of ache inside of him, half joy, half terrible sadness.

~ J.k. Rowling

How awful it was, thought Tessa, remembering Fats the toddler, the way tiny ghosts of your living children haunted your heart; they could never know, and would hate it if they did, how their growing was a constant bereavement.

~ J.k. Rowling

Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic...

~ J.k. Rowling

Very early on in writing the series, I remember a female journalist saying to me that Mrs Weasley, 'Well, you know, she’s just a mother.' And I was absolutely incensed by that comment. Now, I consider myself to be a feminist, and I’d always wanted to show that just because a woman has made a choice, a free choice to say, 'Well, I’m going to raise my family and that’s going to be my choice. I may go back to a career, I may have a career part time, but that’s my choice.' Doesn’t mean that that’s all she can do. And as we proved there in that little battle, Molly Weasley comes out and proves herself the equal of any warrior on that battlefield.

~ J.k. Rowling

You're the cleverest witch I've ever met Hermione.

~ J.k. Rowling

According to Madam Pomfrey, thoughts could leave deeper scars than almost anything else.

~ J.k. Rowling

We are only as strong as we are united, as weak as we are divided.

~ J.k. Rowling

I say to you all, once again -- in the light of Lord Voldemort's return, we are only as strong as we are united, as weak as we are divided. Lord Voldemort's gift for spreading discord and enmity is very great. We can fight it only by showing an equally strong bond of friendship and trust. Differences of habit and language are nothing at all if our aims are identical and our hearts are open.

~ J.k. Rowling

Would he ever have the strength to stop looking?

~ J.k. Rowling

Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.

~ J.k. Rowling

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

~ J.k. Rowling

I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him back to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.

~ J.k. Rowling

Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations.

~ J.k. Rowling

Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility, or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can't remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, the law, or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.You see? If all you remember in years to come is the 'gay wizard' joke, I've come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step to self-improvement.

~ J.k. Rowling

Depression is the most unpleasant thing I have ever experienced. . . . It is that absence of being able to envisage that you will ever be cheerful again. The absence of hope. That very deadened feeling, which is so very different from feeling sad. Sad hurts but it's a healthy feeling. It is a necessary thing to feel. Depression is very different.

~ J.k. Rowling

It’s so difficult to describe depression to someone who’s never been there, because it’s not sadness. I know sadness. Sadness is to cry and to feel. But it’s that cold absence of feeling— that really hollowed-out feeling.

~ J.k. Rowling

You can't live without failing at something, unless you love so cautiously you might as well have nit lived at all, in which case, you fail be default.

~ J.k. Rowling

The most important thing is to read as much as you can, like I did. It will give you an understanding of what makes good writing and it will enlarge your vocabulary.

~ J.k. Rowling

We've all got both light and dark inside us. What matters is the part we choose to act on. That's who we really are.

~ J.k. Rowling

Harry flung himself out from behind the bush and pulled out his wand.EXPECTO PATRONUM! he yelled.And out of the end of his wand burst, not a shapeless cloud of mist, but a blinding, dazzling, silver animal. He screwed up his eyes, trying to see what it was. It looked like a horse. It was galloping silently away from him, across the black surface of the lake. He saw it lower its head and charge at the swarming dementors. . . . Now it was galloping around and around the black shapes on the ground, and the dementors were falling back, scattering, retreating into the darkness. . . . They were gone. The Patronus turned. It was cantering back toward Harry across the still surface of the water. It wasn't a horse. It wasn't a unicorn, either. It was a stag. It was shining brightly as the moon above. . . it was coming back to him.

~ J.k. Rowling

Somewhere out in the darkness, a phoenix was singing in a way Harry had never heard before: a stricken lament of terrible beauty.

~ J.k. Rowling

The last words Albus Dumbledore spoke to the pair of us?' Harry is the best hope we have. Trust him.

~ J.k. Rowling

Course Dumbledore trusts you,” growled Moody. “He’s a trusting man, isn’t he? Believes in second chances. But me — I say there are spots that don’t come off, Snape. Spots that never come off, d’you know what I mean?

~ J.k. Rowling

Dumbledore says people find it far easier to forgive others for being wrong than being right.

~ J.k. Rowling

Every hour that passed added to her grief, because it bore her further away from the living man, and because it was a tiny foretaste of the eternity she would have to spend without him. Again and again she found herself forgetting, for the space of a heartbeat, that he was gone forever and that she could not turn to him for comfort.

~ J.k. Rowling

Grief, it seemed, drove Voldemort out...though Dumbledore, of course, would have said that it was love.

~ J.k. Rowling

Everything had shattered. The fact that it was all still there — the walls and the chairs and the children’s pictures on the walls — meant nothing. Every atom of it had been blasted apart and reconstituted in an instant, and its appearance of permanence and solidity was laughable; it would dissolve at a touch, for everything was suddenly tissue-thin and friable.

~ J.k. Rowling

He gave everything to everybody. Except to me.

~ J.k. Rowling

the world had ended, so why had the battle not ceased

~ J.k. Rowling

There was no waking from this nightmare, no comforting whisper in the dark that he was safe really, that it was all in his imagination; the last and greatest of his protectors had died, and he was more alone than he had ever been.

~ J.k. Rowling

Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and, therefore, the foundation of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

~ J.k. Rowling

We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.

~ J.k. Rowling