Joanne Rowling
Joanne Rowling, better known by her pen name J. K. Rowling, is a British author, philanthropist, film producer, television producer, and screenwriter. (J. K. Rowling Quotes)
“A lie would have no sense unless the truth were felt as dangerous.”
J. K. Rowling
The Cuckoo’s Calling
“A lot of men find it hard to hear how well their other halves get on with other men.”
J. K. Rowling
Career of Evil
“A marked desire to be considered more than he felt himself to be; to become endowed, in fact, with that unpredictable, dangerous and transformative quality: fame.”
J. K. Rowling
The Cuckoo’s Calling
“A pause. Sense entered into a short, violent skirmish with instinct and inclination, and was overwhelmed.”
J. K. Rowling
The Cuckoo’s Calling
“A simple and heart-warming fable, one might think – in which case, one would reveal oneself to be an innocent nincompoop.”
J. K. Rowling
The Tales of Beedle the Bard
“According to Madam Pomfrey, thoughts could leave deeper scars than almost anything else.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
“Acquitted herself magnificently with the now infamous words: ‘I assert our inalienable right to party’, which drew cheers from all present.”
J. K. Rowling
Short Stories from Hogwarts of Power, Politics and Pesky Poltergeists
“After all, you don’t have to be a sword-wielding Gryffindor to be a hero; sometimes, all it takes is having your heart in the right place.”
J. K. Rowling
Short Stories from Hogwarts of Heroism, Hardship and Dangerous Hobbies
“Age is foolish and forgetful when it underestimates youth.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
“All she had left of her old life and her old uncertainties was attacking familiar targets.”
J. K. Rowling
The Casual Vacancy
“All that was left for Fred to do was beam at his subjects whenever he went out in his carriage and go hunting five times a week with his two best friends, Lord Spittleworth and Lord Flapoon.”
J. K. Rowling
The Ickabog
“Although people rarely died playing Quidditch, referees had been known to vanish and turn up months later in the Sahara Desert.”
J. K. Rowling
Quidditch Through the Ages
“Always the innocent are the first victims, so it has been for ages past, so it is now.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
“An Obscures grows in the absence of love as a dark twin, an only friend.”
J. K. Rowling
Fantastic Beasts – The Crimes of Grindelwald
“And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.”
J. K. Rowling
Very Good Lives
“And sure enough, in seeking to become superhuman this foolhardy young man renders himself inhuman. The heart that he has locked away slowly shrivels and grows hair, symbolising his own descent to beasthood.”
J. K. Rowling
The Tales of Beedle the Bard
“And then he greeted Death as an old friend, and went with him gladly, and, equals, they departed this life.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
“And then, at last, the frenzy wore itself into staleness, and even the journalist had nothing left to say, but that too much had been said already.”
J. K. Rowling
The Cuckoo’s Calling
“And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom: ‘As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.’ I wish you all very good lives.”
J. K. Rowling
Very Good Lives
“Anyone can speak Troll. All you have to do is point and grunt.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
“Apparently wizards poke their noses in everywhere!”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
“As always, he found her better-looking in the flesh than in the memory he had of her when not present.”
J. K. Rowling
Career of Evil
“As for poor Mrs. Tenderloin, Spittleworth barely considered her at all, but I’d like you to know that she was a very kind person, who babysat her friends’ children and sang in the local choir.”
J. K. Rowling
The Ickabog
“As for the fact that Malfoy, Crabbe, and Goyle apeared to be going their different ways when they were usually inseparable, these things happened as people got older–Ron and Hermione, Harry reflected sadly, were living proof.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
“As Hagrid had said, what would come would come and he would have to meet it when it did.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
“As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters. I wish you all very good lives.”
J. K. Rowling
Very Good Lives
“As much money and life as you could want! The two things most human beings would choose above all – the trouble is, humans do have a knack of choosing precisely those things that are worst for them.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
“As our listeners will know, unless they’ve taken refuge at the bottom of a garden pond or somewhere similar, You-Know-Who’s strategy of remaining in the shadows is creating a nice little climate of panic.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
“As suddenly as they had reached for each other, they broke apart. Tears were rolling down Robin’s face. For one moment of madness, Strike yearned to say, “Come with me”, but there are words that can never be unsaid or forgotten, and those, he knew, were some of them.”
J. K. Rowling
Lethal White
“At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again…”
J. K. Rowling
Very Good Lives
“At this precise moment in time, I take no pleasure in being right.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
“Autumn seemed to arrive suddenly that year. The morning of the first September was crisp and golden as an apple.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
“Bangs and smoke were more often the marks of ineptitude than expertise.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
“Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Sil’vry Tay! Alas! I am very sorry to say That ninety lives have been taken away On the last Sabbath day of 1879, Which will be remember’d for a very long time.”
J. K. Rowling
Short Stories from Hogwarts of Heroism, Hardship and Dangerous Hobbies
“Because, sometimes you’ve got to think about more than your own safety! Sometimes you’ve got to think about the greater good! This is war!”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
“Bert wanted to say something to his best friend, but what had happened was too enormous and dreadful for words. Bert could hardly bear to imagine how he’d feel if his mother had disappeared forever into the cold, hard earth.”
J. K. Rowling
The Ickabog
“Birth and death: there was the same consciousness of heightened existence and of her own elevated importance”
J. K. Rowling
The Casual Vacancy
“Bravery doesn’t forgive stupidity. Always think. Think what’s possible.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
“But the lies she told were woven into the fabric of her being, her life; so that to live with her and love her was to become slowly enmeshed by them, to wrestle her for the truth, to struggle to maintain foothold on reality.”
J. K. Rowling
The Cuckoo’s Calling
“But who could bear to know which stars were already dead, she thought, blinking up at the night sky; could anybody stand to know that they all were?”
J. K. Rowling
The Casual Vacancy
“By all means continue destroying my possessions. I daresay I have too many.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
“Choice was dangerous: you had to forgo all other possibilities when you chose.”
J. K. Rowling
The Casual Vacancy
“Choosing to live in narrow spaces leads to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the willfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid. What is more, those who choose not to empathize enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it through our own apathy.”
J. K. Rowling
Very Good Lives
“Contemplating the task ahead would not make it easier or the water warmer.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
“Clever as I am, I remain just as big a fool as anyone else.”
J. K. Rowling
The Tales of Beedle the Bard
“Couples tended to be of roughly equivalent personal attractiveness, though of course factors such as money often seemed to secure a partner of significantly better looks than oneself.”
J. K. Rowling
The Cuckoo’s Calling
“Curiosity is not a sin…. But we should exercise caution with our curiosity… yes, indeed.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
“Dark times lie ahead of us and there will be a time when we must choose between what is easy and what is right. -Albus Dumbledore”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
“Death comes for us all in the end.”
J. K. Rowling
The Tales of Beedle the Bard
“Death’s got an Invisibility Cloak?” Harry interrupted again. “So he can sneak up on people,” said Ron. “Sometimes he gets bored of running at them, flapping his arms and shrieking…”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
“Differences of habit and language are nothing at all if our aims are identical and our hearts are open.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
“Do not pity the dead, Harry. Pity the living, and, above all those who live without love.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
“Do not resist and do not panic or the animal mind may gain the ascendancy and you could do something foolish, such as try to escape through a window or charge a wall.”
J. K. Rowling
Short Stories from Hogwarts of Heroism, Hardship and Dangerous Hobbies
“Doctors know things, don’t they? In and out of people’s houses, having confidential consultations. They’re like priests. They hear secrets.”
J. K. Rowling
Troubled Blood
“Dolores Umbridge may have looked like an iced cupcake, but she was anything but sweet. She was savage, sadistic and remorseless.”
J. K. Rowling
Short Stories from Hogwarts of Power, Politics and Pesky Poltergeists
“Don’t let the muggles get you down.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
“Dumbledore says people find it far easier to forgive others for being wrong than being right.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
“Dumbledore will only leave from Hogwarts when there are none loyal to him!”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
“DUMBLEDORE: Do you know why I admire you, Newt? More, perhaps, than any man I know? (off NEWT’S surprise) You don’t seek power or popularity. You simply ask, is the thing right in itself? If it is, then I must do it, no matter the cost.”
J. K. Rowling
Fantastic Beasts – The Crimes of Grindelwald
“DUMBLEDORE: Harry, there is never a perfect answer in this messy, emotional world. Perfection is beyond the reach of humankind, beyond the reach of magic. In every shining moment of happiness is that drop of poison: the knowledge that pain will come again. Be honest to those you love, show your pain. To suffer is as human as to breathe.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
“DUMBLEDORE: Those that we love never truly leave us, Harry. There are things that death cannot touch. Paint… and memory… and love.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
“Even if I could, I wouldn’t. Scars can come in handy. I have one myself above my left knee that is a perfect map of the London Underground.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
“Even the cleverest people can be bloody stupid when it comes to their love lives. In fact, I sometimes think, the cleverer they are with books, the stupider they are with sex.”
J. K. Rowling
Troubled Blood
“Even though he’d been craving solitude for the past ten days, the prospect of his silent attic room was cheerless, after these long days of dread and loss.”
J. K. Rowling
Troubled Blood
“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.”
J. K. Rowling
The Casual Vacancy
“Every married person he knew seemed desperate to chivvy others into matrimony, no matter how poor an advertisement they themselves were for the institution.”
J. K. Rowling
Troubled Blood
“Every second he breathed, the smell of the grass, the cool air on his face, was so precious: To think that people had years and years, time to waste, so much time it dragged, and he was clinging to each second.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
“Everybody finished the song at different times. At last, only the Weasley twins were left singing along to a very slow funeral march.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
“Everyday things became so strange, when you were waiting for something dreadful to happen. Her heart was pounding fast.”
J. K. Rowling
Troubled Blood
“Everyone liked Robin. He liked Robin. How could he fail to like her, after everything they had been through together? However, from the very first he had told himself: this far and no further. A distance must be maintained. Barriers must remain in place.”
J. K. Rowling
Career of Evil
“Experience had taught Strike that there was a certain type of woman to whom he was unusually attractive. Their common characteristics were intelligence and the flickering intensity of badly wired lamps.”
J. K. Rowling
The Silkworm
“Extinguished almost at once by a sense of crushing duty. He had always known that he could not marry”
J. K. Rowling
Short Stories from Hogwarts of Heroism, Hardship and Dangerous Hobbies
“Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations.”
J. K. Rowling
Very Good Lives
“Failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was.”
J. K. Rowling
Very Good Lives
“Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
“Finally, the truth. Lying with his face pressed into the dusty carpet of the office where he had once thought he was learning the secrets of victory, Harry understood at last that he was not supposed to survive.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
“Folklore and superstition haven’t gone away. They’ll never go away. People need them. I think a purely scientific world would be a cold place.”
J. K. Rowling
Troubled Blood
“Following a private conversation with Harry, Minerva McGonagall later took the controversial decision to add a portrait of Severus Snape to the gallery of old headmasters and headmistresses in her tower office.”
J. K. Rowling
Short Stories from Hogwarts of Heroism, Hardship and Dangerous Hobbies
“From this point forth, we shall be leaving the firm foundation of fact and journeying together through the murky marshes of memory into thickets of wildest guesswork.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
“Greatness inspires envy, envy engenders spite, spite spawns lies.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
“Handsome in the manner of an Aryan prince, possessor of a trust fund, born to fulfill a preordained place in his family and the world; a man with all the confidence twelve generations of well-documented lineage can give.”
J. K. Rowling
The Cuckoo’s Calling
“Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
“Harry Potter was a highly unusual boy in many ways.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
“Harry was just thinking that all he needed was for Dumbledore’s pet bird to die while he was all alone in the office with it, when the bird burst into flames.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
“He can run faster than Severus Snape confronted with shampoo.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
“He didn’t realize that love as powerful as your mother’s for you leaves its own mark.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
“He had never been able to understand the assumption of intimacy fans felt with those they had never met.”
J. K. Rowling
The Cuckoo’s Calling
“He holds a vial of some glowing gold substance in the palm of his hand.”
J. K. Rowling
Fantastic Beasts – The Crimes of Grindelwald
“He might have been encased in a thick glass bubble, so separate did he feel from his three dining companions. It was a sensation with which he was only too familiar, that of walking in a giant sphere of worry, enclosed by it, watching his own terrors roll by, obscuring the outside world.”
J. K. Rowling
The Casual Vacancy
“He might have crawled up into the airing cupboard and died, but I mustn’t get my hopes up.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
“He must have known I’d want to leave you.” “No, he must have known you would always want to come back.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
“He never seemed to grasp the immense mutability of human nature, nor to appreciate that behind every nondescript face lay a wild and unique hinterland like his own.”
J. K. Rowling
The Casual Vacancy
“He possessed a finely honed sense for the strange and the wicked. He had seen things all through his childhood that other people preferred to imagine happened only in films.”
J. K. Rowling
Career of Evil
“He was my mum and dad’s best friend. He’s a convicted murderer, but he’s broken out of wizard prison and he’s on the run. He likes to keep in touch with me, though…keep up with my news…check if I’m happy.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
“He was not a man who told himself comfortable lies.”
J. K. Rowling
Career of Evil
“He was supposed to be turning a beetle into a button, but all he managed to do was give his beetle a lot of exercise as it scuttled over the desktop avoiding his wand.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
“He would never know what it was like to feel yourself small, weak and powerless. He would never understand what rape did to your feelings about your own body: to find yourself reduced to a thing, an object, a piece of fuckable meat.”
J. K. Rowling
Career of Evil
“Hearing voices no one else can hear isn’t a good sign, even in the wizarding world.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
“Her grief was so big and wild it terrified her, like an evil beast that had erupted from under the floorboards.”
J. K. Rowling
The Casual Vacancy
“Her punishment quill is of her own invention PARENTAGE:”
J. K. Rowling
Short Stories from Hogwarts of Power, Politics and Pesky Poltergeists
“Hermione was screaming again: the sound went through Harry like physical pain.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
“Hers was the kind of family that commissioned painters to immortalize its young: a background utterly alien to Strike, and one he had come to know like a dangerous foreign country.”
J. K. Rowling
The Cuckoo’s Calling
“His eyes are as green as a fresh pickled toad, His hair is as dark as a blackboard. I wish he was mine, he’s really divine, The hero who conquered the Dark Lord.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
“Hogwarts isn’t actually that pleasant a place when you don’t fit in.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
“Hogwarts was the first and best home he had known. He and Voldemort and Snape, the abandoned boys, had all found home here. ”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
“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
The Casual Vacancy
“How could the death of someone you had never met affect you so?”
J. K. Rowling
The Cuckoo’s Calling
“How easy it was to capitalize on a person’s own bent for self-destruction; how simple to nudge them into non-being, then to stand back and shrug and agree that it had been the inevitable result of a chaotic, catastrophic life.”
J. K. Rowling
The Cuckoo’s Calling
“How often were you aware, while it happened, that you were living an hour that would change the course of your life forever?”
J. K. Rowling
Lethal White
“How very mysterious human beings were, even to those who thought they knew them best. Infidelity and bigamy, kinks and fetishes, theft and fraud, stalking and harassment: she’d now delved into so many secret lives she’d lost count.”
J. K. Rowling
Troubled Blood
“However, as he drove through the countryside, passing woods and forests where he might easily strangle Daisy and bury her body, it slowly dawned on Private Prodd that he wasn’t going to be able to do it. He happened to have a little niece around Daisy’s age, of whom he was very fond. In fact, every time he imagined himself strangling Daisy, he seemed to see his niece Rosie in his mind’s eye, pleading for her life. So instead of turning off the dirt track into the woods, Prodd drove the wagon onwards, racking his brains as to what to do with Daisy.”
J. K. Rowling
The Ickabog
“Huddled together beside the wagon, all four were soon unconscious, and the snow crept up their bodies as the moon began to rise. And then a vast shadow rippled over them. Two enormous arms covered in long green hair, like marsh weed, descended upon the four friends. As easily as if they were babies, the Ickabog scooped them up and bore them away across the marsh.”
J. K. Rowling
The Ickabog
“Humans have a knack of choosing precisely those things that are worst for them.”
J. K. Rowling
The Tales of Beedle the Bard
“Humans often assumed symmetry and equality where none existed.”
J. K. Rowling
The Cuckoo’s Calling
“I am not going to let myself be beaten to the ground by the dread of what may happen.”
J. K. Rowling
Lethal White
“I believe two different kinds of will can exist at the same time in one person. Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm”
J. K. Rowling
Lethal White
“I believe your friends Misters Fred and George Weasley were responsible for trying to send you a toilet seat. No doubt they thought it would amuse you.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
“I cannot rest from travel: I will drink Life to the lees; all times I have enjoy’d Greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those That loved me, and alone; on shore and when Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades Vext the dim sea: I am become a name…”
J. K. Rowling
The Cuckoo’s Calling
“I do know a few things, actually. I know you have rather backwards laws about relations with non-magic people. That you’re not mean to befriend them, that you can’t marry them, which seems mildly absurd to me.”
J. K. Rowling
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
“I enjoyed the meetings, too. It was like having friends.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
“I hope you’re pleased with yourselves. We could all have been killed – or worse, expelled. Now if you don’t mind, I’m going to bed.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
“I make mistakes like the next man. In fact, being–forgive me–rather cleverer than most men, my mistakes tend to be correspondingly huger.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
“I must admit, Peter, I have difficulty in understanding why an innocent man would want to spend twelve years as a J. K. Rowlingrat.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
“I solemnly swear that I am up to no good.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
“I tell you, that dragon’s the most horrible animal I’ve ever met, but the way Hagrid goes on about it, you’d think it was a fluffy little bunny rabbit.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
“I think I’ll just go down and have some pudding and wait for it all to turn up – it always does in the end.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
“I think marriage is nearly always an unfathomable entity, even to the people inside it.”
J. K. Rowling
Lethal White
“I think the willfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.”
J. K. Rowling
Very Good Lives
“I think there are a lot of nutters in the world, and the less we reward them for their nuttery, the better for all of us.”
J. K. Rowling
Troubled Blood
“I want to commit the murder I was imprisoned for.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
“I was only going to say that abused people cling to their abusers, don’t they? They’ve been brainwashed to believe there’s no alternative.” I was the bloody alternative, standing there, right in front of her!”
J. K. Rowling
Career of Evil
“I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realized, 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
Very Good Lives
“I was thirty-five. It’s a funny age. It starts dawning on you forty’s really gonna happen to you, not just to other people.”
J. K. Rowling
Troubled Blood
“I would advise you to buy it, because if you read too long without handing over money you will find yourself the object of the Thief’s Curse”
J. K. Rowling
Quidditch Through the Ages
“I would assume that you were going to offer me refreshment, but the evidence so far suggests that that would be optimistic to the point of foolishness.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
“I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiration date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you.”
J. K. Rowling
Very Good Lives
“I’ve always been clever, but that don’t help a woman. It’s better to be pretty. You have a better life if you’re good-looking.”
J. K. Rowling
Troubled Blood
“I’ve done this job for centuries On every student’s head I’ve sat Of thoughts I take inventories For I’m the famous Sorting Hat I’ve sorted high, I’ve sorted low, I’ve done the job through thick and thin So put me on and you will know Which House you should be in ”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
“If all goes well, you will be able to save more than one innocent life tonight.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
“If he doesn’t stop trying to save your life he’s going to kill you.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
“If I had to choose a companion to be at the return of eternal darkness with, I’d choose you.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
“If she could have done one thing to make absolutely sure that every single person in this school will read your interview, it was banning it!”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
“If there’s one thing these stories prove, it’s that heroism comes in all shapes, sizes and varieties – whether it’s Remus Lupin giving his life to save the wizarding world or Silvanus Kettleburn hurling Flobberworms at Death Eaters from his attic. After all, you don’t have to be a sword-wielding Gryffindor to be a hero; sometimes, all it takes is having your heart in the right place.”
J. K. Rowling
Short Stories from Hogwarts of Heroism, Hardship and Dangerous Hobbies
“If you have to ask, you’ll never know. If you know, you need only ask.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
“If you made a better rat than a human, it’s not much to boast about, Peter.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
“If you want to know what a man’s like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
“I’ll be in my bedroom, making no noise and pretending I’m not there.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
“I’ll join you when Hell freezes over,” said Neville. “Dumbledore’s Army!” he shouted, and there was an answering cheer from the crowd, whom Voldemort’s Silencing Charms seemed unable to hold.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
“I’m going to keep going until I succeed — or die. Don’t think I don’t know how this might end. I’ve known it for years.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
“In a way, an explanation had never been the point. She had simply liked being the only one who wanted to find out the truth.”
J. K. Rowling
Career of Evil
“In every shining moment of happiness is that drop of poison: the knowledge that pain will come again. Be honest to those you love, show your pain. To suffer is as human as to breathe.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
“In spite of her plainness that would have made wallflowers of other women, she radiated a great sense of self-importance.”
J. K. Rowling
The Cuckoo’s Calling
“In the depths of his tiredness, surrounded by these blank, sheep-like visages, he found himself pondering the accidents that had brought all of them into being. Every birth was, viewed properly, mere chance. With a hundred million sperm swimming blindly through the darkness, the odds against a person becoming themselves were staggering.”
J. K. Rowling
The Silkworm
“In the inverted food chain of fame, it was the big beasts who were stalked and hunted”
J. K. Rowling
The Cuckoo’s Calling
“In the wrong hands, power and magic can be dark, lethal, and consuming. Lord Voldemort showed us that; he sought power so viciously that he tore apart the fabric of his soul and lost everything that made him human. He is the ultimate villain, motivated by an ice-cold desire for power and destruction.”
J. K. Rowling
Short Stories from Hogwarts of Power, Politics and Pesky Poltergeists
“Indifference and neglect often do much more damage than outright dislike.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
“Instinct was clawing at him like an importuning dog.”
J. K. Rowling
The Cuckoo’s Calling
“It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
“It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing.”
J. K. Rowling
Very Good Lives
“It frightened people when you were honest; it shocked them.”
J. K. Rowling
The Casual Vacancy
“It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and should therefore be treated with great caution.”
J. K. Rowling
The Tales of Beedle the Bard
“It is a curious thing, Harry, but perhaps those who are best suited to power are those who have never sought it. Those who, like you, have leadership thrust upon them, and take up the mantle because they must, and find to their own surprise that they wear it well.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
“It is a strange thing, but when you are dreading something, and would give anything to slow down time, it has a disobliging habit of speeding up.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
“It is exceptionally lonely, being Draco Malfoy. I will always be suspected. There is no escaping the past.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
“It is hard to abruptly shrug off a long-established love Hard, but this, somehow, you must do.”
J. K. Rowling
Lethal White
“It is my belief… that the truth is generally preferable to lies.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
“It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
“It is the unknown we fear when we look upon death and darkness, nothing more.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
“It matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
“It seemed impossible that there could be people in the world who still desired food, who laughed, who neither knew nor cared that Sirius Black was gone forever.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
“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
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
“It took me a long time to discover your weakness, Albus Potter. I thought it was pride, I thought it was the need to impress your father, but then I realised your weakness was the same as your father’s – friendship.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
“It was a glorious thing, to be given hope, when all had seemed lost.”
J. K. Rowling
Lethal White
“It was four in the morning, the hopeless hour when shivering insomniacs inhabit a world of hollow shadow, and existence seems frail and strange.”
J. K. Rowling
Lethal White
“It was his own grief turned magically to song.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
“It was important, Dumbledore said, to fight, and fight again, and keep fighting, for only then could evil be kept at bay, though never quite eradicated.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
“It was so good to be held. If only their relationship could be distilled into simple, wordless gestures of comfort. Why had humans ever learned to talk?”
J. K. Rowling
The Casual Vacancy
“It was strange how your brain could know what your heart refused to accept.”
J. K. Rowling
The Casual Vacancy
“It was, he thought, the difference between being dragged into the arena to face a battle to the death and walking into the arena with your head held high. Some people, perhaps, would say that there was little to choose between the two ways, but Dumbledore knew – and so do I, thought Harry, with a rush of fierce pride, and so did my parents – that there was all the difference in the world.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
“It’s lucky it’s dark. I haven’t blushed so much since Madam Pomfrey told me she liked my new earmuffs.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
“It’s that wounded-poet crap, that soul-pain shit, that too-much-of-a-tortured-genius-to-wash bollocks. Brush your teeth, you little bastard. You’re not fucking Byron.”
J. K. Rowling
The Cuckoo’s Calling
“J.K. Rowling may have only a vague idea of Sybill Trelawney’s pre-Hogwarts life, but she has definite ideas about Seers, particularly the practice of consulting a Naming Seer.”
J. K. Rowling
Short Stories from Hogwarts of Heroism, Hardship and Dangerous Hobbies
“Just because it’s taken you three years to notice, Ron, doesn’t mean no one else has spotted I’m a girl!”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
“Just because you have the emotional range of a teaspoon doesn’t mean we all have.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
“Keeping busy was the only answer: action had always been his drug of choice.”
J. K. Rowling
The Silkworm
“Killing is not so easy as the innocent believe.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
“Known to successive generations of students as ‘Professor McGonagall,’ Minerva – always something of a feminist – announced that she would be keeping her own name upon marriage. Traditionalists sniffed – why was Minerva refusing to accept a pure-blood name, and keeping that of her Muggle father?”
J. K. Rowling
Short Stories from Hogwarts of Heroism, Hardship and Dangerous Hobbies
“Krystal’s slow passage up the school had resembled the passage of a goat through the body of a boa constrictor, being highly visible and uncomfortable for both parties concerned.”
J. K. Rowling
The Casual Vacancy
“Let us step into the night and pursue that flighty temptress, adventure.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
“Let us win, but if we cannot win, let us break a few heads.”
J. K. Rowling
Quidditch Through the Ages
“Life had taught him that a great and powerful love could be felt for the most apparently unworthy people, a circumstance that ought, after all, to give everybody consolation.”
J. K. Rowling
Lethal White
“Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone’s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.”
J. K. Rowling
Very Good Lives
“Life’s taught me things can always get worse than they are. I thought I had it hard, then they wheeled a bloke onto the ward who’d had both his legs and his genitals blown off.”
J. K. Rowling
Troubled Blood
“Like most writers, I tend to find out what I feel on a subject by writing about it. It is how we interpret the world, how we make sense of it.”
J. K. Rowling
The Silkworm
“Likeable, but inept. Resigned after a mismanaged goblin rebellion.”
J. K. Rowling
Short Stories from Hogwarts of Heroism, Hardship and Dangerous Hobbies
“Longbottom, if brains were gold, you’d be poorer than Weasley, and that’s saying something.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
“Love blinds. We have both tried to give our sons, not what they needed, but what we needed. We’ve been so busy trying to rewrite our own pasts, we’ve blighted their present.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
“Lucy’s idea of sympathy compared unfavorably with some of the interrogation techniques they had used at Guantanamo.”
J. K. Rowling
The Cuckoo’s Calling
“Magic causes as much trouble as it cures.”
J. K. Rowling
The Tales of Beedle the Bard
“Many lonely people, Strike knew, found it pleasant to be the focus of somebody’s undivided attention and sought to prolong the novel experience.”
J. K. Rowling
The Silkworm
“Matthew would not like this, she had said. He would have liked it even less had he know how much Strike had liked it.”
J. K. Rowling
Career of Evil
“Meanwhile, most of their fellow citizens competed with each other to demonstrate their passionate belief in the Ickabog. They propped up cheap copies of the painting of King Fred fighting the Ickabog in their windows, and hung wooden signs on their doors, which bore messages like PROUD TO PAY THE ICKABOG TAX and DOWN WITH THE ICKABOG, UP WITH THE KING! Some parents even taught their children to bow and curtsy to the tax collectors.”
J. K. Rowling
The Ickabog
“Men looked so tragic when they cried.”
J. K. Rowling
Career of Evil
“Most of the time, I think you have to make a choice—at a certain point—of the man you want to be. And I will tell you at that time you need a parent or a friend. And if you’ve learnt to hate your parent by then and you have no friends…then you’re all alone. And being alone—that’s so hard.” -Draco Malfoy”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
“My philosophy is that worrying means you suffer twice.”
J. K. Rowling
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
“Nevertheless, there was a kind of relief in admitting the painful truth: she cared deeply for her partner.”
J. K. Rowling
Troubled Blood
“Newt Scamander: My philosophy is that worrying means you suffer twice.”
J. K. Rowling
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
“No man or woman alive, magical or not, has ever escaped some form of injury, whether physical, mental, or emotional. To hurt is as human as to breathe.”
J. K. Rowling
The Tales of Beedle the Bard
“No witch has ever claimed to own the Elder Wand. Make of that what you will.”
J. K. Rowling
The Tales of Beedle the Bard
“Nobody who had not lived there would ever understand that London was a country unto itself. They might resent it for the fact that it held more power and money than any other British city, but they could not understand that poverty carried its own flavour there, where everything cost more, where the relentless distinctions between those who had succeeded and those who had not were constantly, painfully visible.”
J. K. Rowling
Career of Evil
“Nobody would ever again say that he was selfish, vain, and cruel! For the sake of a smelly, simple old shepherd and his worthless old mongrel, he, King Fred the Fearless, was going to hunt the Ickabog!”
J. K. Rowling
The Ickabog
“Not only did Peeves break easily through the giant bell jar, showering an entire corridor with broken glass, he also escaped the trap armed with several cutlasses, crossbows, a blunderbuss and a miniature cannon.”
J. K. Rowling
Short Stories from Hogwarts of Power, Politics and Pesky Poltergeists
“Nothing like a nighttime stroll to give you ideas.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
“Now the whole Royal Guard understood the choice facing them. They weighed in their minds the huge influence Spittleworth was known to have over the king, and the fact that Major Roach was now caressing the barrel of his rifle in a menacing manner, and they remembered the sudden death of their former leader, Major Beamish. They also considered the promise of more gold, and speedy promotion, if they agreed to believe in the Ickabog, and in Private Nobby Buttons.”
J. K. Rowling
The Ickabog
“Numbing the pain for a while will make it worse when you finally feel it.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
“Of all the trees we could’ve hit, we had to get one that hits back.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
“Oh well… I’d just been thinking, if you had died, you’d have been welcome to share my toilet.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
“Oh, the thrill of the chase as I soar through the air With the Snitch up ahead and the wind in my hair As I draw ever closer, the crowd gives a shout But then comes a Bludger and I am knocked out.”
J. K. Rowling
Quidditch Through the Ages
“Once again you’ve put your keen and penetrating mind to the task and as usual come to the wrong conclusion!”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
“One can never have enough socks,” said Dumbledore. “Another Christmas has come and gone and I didn’t get a single pair. People will insist on giving me books.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
“One mellows almost without realizing it’s a compensation of age, because anger is exhausting.”
J. K. Rowling
The Silkworm
“One person. All it takes is one person. I couldn’t save Harry for Lily. So now I give my allegiance to the cause she believed in. And it’s possible — that along the way I started believing in it myself.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
“One thing life’s taught me: where there’s no capacity for joy, there’s no capacity for goodness.”
J. K. Rowling
Troubled Blood
“Other people his age had houses and washing machines, cars and television sets, furniture and gardens and mountain bikes and lawnmowers: he had four boxes of crap, and a set of matchless memories.”
J. K. Rowling
The Cuckoo’s Calling
“People do kill themselves, you know, Miranda, when they think their whole reason for living is being taken away from them. Even the fact that other people think their suffering is a joke isn’t enough to shake them out of it.”
J. K. Rowling
The Silkworm
“People think they know all there is to know about you, but the best bits of you are – have always been – heroic in really quiet ways.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
“People who insist on opening cans of worms, shouldn’t complain when they get covered in slime.”
J. K. Rowling
Troubled Blood
“Percy wouldn’t notice a joke if it danced naked in front of him wearing one of Dobby’s hats.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
“Poor kid has saved the world. That blanket was masterful. I mean, he also almost destroyed the world, but probably best not to focus on that bit.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
“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
Very Good Lives
“Powerful infatuations can be induced by the skilful potioneer, but never yet has anyone managed to create the truly unbreakable, eternal, unconditional attachment that alone can be called Love”
J. K. Rowling
The Tales of Beedle the Bard
“Pretending you’re OK when you aren’t isn’t strength.”
J. K. Rowling
Lethal White
“Priests and doctors, it’s hardwired in most of us to trust them, don’t you think? Don’t you think we tend to invest some categories of people with unearned goodness? I suppose we’ve all got a need to trust people who seem to have power over life and death.”
J. K. Rowling
Troubled Blood
“Professor Kettleburn, our Care of Magical Creatures teacher, retired at the end of last year in order to enjoy more time with his remaining limbs.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
“Psychology’s loss,” said Strike, “is private detection’s gain.”
J. K. Rowling
Career of Evil
“Queenie: People are easiest to read when they’re hurting.”
J. K. Rowling
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
“Quirrell is, in effect, turned into a temporary Horcrux by Voldemort.”
J. K. Rowling
Short Stories from Hogwarts of Power, Politics and Pesky Poltergeists
“Regret is my constant companion. Do not let it become yours.”
J. K. Rowling
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
“Remember, if the time should come when you have to make a choice between what is right and what is easy, remember what happened to a boy who was good, and kind, and brave, because he strayed across the path of Lord Voldemort. Remember Cedric Diggory.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
“Ridiculous,” he said breathlessly. “You ought to give up detecting and try fantasy writing.”
J. K. Rowling
The Cuckoo’s Calling
“Ron,” said Hermione in a dignified voice, “you are the most insensitive wart I have ever had the misfortune to meet.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
“SCORPIUS: Thank you for being my light in the darkness”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
“SCORPIUS: The world changes and we change with it. I am better off in this world. But the world is not better. And I don’t want that.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
“See, they’re currently in alien terrain, surrounded by millions of the most vicious creatures on the planet. Humans. – Newt Scamander”
J. K. Rowling
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
“Seven and a half million hearts were beating in close proximity in this heaving old city, and many, after all, would be aching far worse than his.”
J. K. Rowling
The Cuckoo’s Calling
“She couldn’t understand a vocation. Some people can’t; at best, work’s about status and paychecks for them, it hasn’t got value in itself.”
J. K. Rowling
The Silkworm
“She emanated that aura of grandeur that replaces sexual allure in the successful older woman.”
J. K. Rowling
The Silkworm
“She felt as though she’d suddenly been transported from the distant past into a brash and indifferent present.”
J. K. Rowling
Troubled Blood
“She lay dying, wrapped in invisible robes of martyrdom, presenting her helplessness and passivity to him like adornments, and his dominant feeling was distaste.”
J. K. Rowling
The Cuckoo’s Calling
“She seemed to think that one of the perks of marriage was that it gave you rights of comment and intrusion over single people’s love lives.”
J. K. Rowling
The Casual Vacancy
“She thought it might be the very first time that Strike had ever given any indication that he saw her as a woman, and she silently filed away the exchange to pore over later, in solitude.”
J. K. Rowling
Career of Evil
“She was the unique woman in his life who’d never tried to change.”
J. K. Rowling
Troubled Blood
“Shortest serving Minister. Lasted two months; resigned after the goblins joined forces with werewolves.”
J. K. Rowling
Short Stories from Hogwarts of Power, Politics and Pesky Poltergeists
“Skirting the rubble and wreckage of the street at the foot of Center Point, he marched past a gigantic gold statue of Freddie Mercury that stood over the entrance of the Dominion Theatre across the road, head bowed, one fist raised in the air, like some pagan god of chaos.”
J. K. Rowling
The Cuckoo’s Calling
“So that’s little Scorpious. Make sure you beat him in every test, Rosie. Thank god you’ve inherited your mother’s brains.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
“Some of her self-hatred had oozed out with the blood.”
J. K. Rowling
The Casual Vacancy
“Sometimes you remind me a lot of James. He called it my ‘furry little problem’ in company. Many people were under the impression that I owned a badly behaved rabbit.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
“Sometimes, if she simply remained quiet, and let the inadequacy of his excuses reverberate on the air, he became ashamed and backtracked.”
J. K. Rowling
The Casual Vacancy
“Strike felt abnormally huge and hairy; a woolly mammoth attempting to blend in among capuchin monkeys.”
J. K. Rowling
The Cuckoo’s Calling
“Strike had long since come to believe that she engineered situations out of an apparently insatiable need for conflict.”
J. K. Rowling
Lethal White
“Strike had not been able to think of a better course of action, given that he intended to stay until he had spoken to Robin again, than continuing to drink.”
J. K. Rowling
Lethal White
“Strike knew how deeply ingrained was the belief that the evil conceal their dangerous predilections for violence and domination. When they wear them like bangles for all to see, the gullible populace laughs, calls it a pose, or finds it strangely attractive.”
J. K. Rowling
Career of Evil
“Strike missed the absence of an overriding objective, in pursuit of which he could shelve his sadness; missed the imperative to dismiss pain and distress in the service of something greater, which had sustained him in the military.”
J. K. Rowling
Troubled Blood
“Strike noticed that, in spite of Duffield’s air of disorientation and distress, he had made a good job of applying his eyeliner.”
J. K. Rowling
The Cuckoo’s Calling
“Strike was used to playing archaeologist among the ruins of people’s traumatised memories.”
J. K. Rowling
The Cuckoo’s Calling
“Strike would have advised any friend to leave and not look back, but he had come to see her like a virus in his blood that he doubted he would ever eradicate; the best he could hope for was to control its symptoms.”
J. K. Rowling
The Silkworm
“Studying the young woman’s long thin legs, Tessa wondered how different her life would have been if she had had legs like that. She could not help but suspect that it would have been almost entirely different.”
J. K. Rowling
The Casual Vacancy
“Such is the universal desire for fame that those who achieve it accidentally or unwillingly will wait in vain for pity.”
J. K. Rowling
Lethal White
“That’s the trouble with friends you’ve had for decades, isn’t it? They know too much.”
J. K. Rowling
Troubled Blood
“The argument had been in full swing when Matthew’s father telephoned with the news that a funny turn Matthew’s mother had suffered the previous week had been diagnosed as a mini-stroke. After this, she and Matthew felt that squabbling about Strike was in bad taste, so they went to bed in an unsatisfactory state of theoretical reconciliation, both, Robin knew, still seething.”
J. K. Rowling
The Silkworm
“The bond between parent and child is the root from which all success, all well-being, grows.”
J. K. Rowling
The Tales of Beedle the Bard
“The boundary between his professional and private lives was, if not precisely non-existent, then flexible and porous.”
J. K. Rowling
Lethal White
“The club motto was changed in 1972 from “We shall conquer” to “Let’s all just keep our fingers crossed and hope for the best.” Falmouth”
J. K. Rowling
Quidditch Through the Ages
“The consequences of our actions are always so complicated, so diverse, that predicting the future is a very difficult business indeed.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
“The dead could only speak through the mouths of those left behind, and through the signs they left scattered behind them. Strike had felt the living woman behind the words she had written to friends; he had heard her voice on a telephone held to his ear; but now, looking down on the last thing she had ever seen in her life, he felt strangely close to her.”
J. K. Rowling
The Cuckoo’s Calling
“The detective seemed to remember reading that advertisers used Scottish accents to suggest integrity and honesty.”
J. K. Rowling
Career of Evil
“The fact that you can feel pain like this is your greatest strength”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
“The feel of her was both new and familiar, as though he had held her a long time ago, as though he had missed it without knowing it for years.”
J. K. Rowling
Lethal White
“The Forbidden Forest looked as though it had been enchanted, each tree smattered with silver, and Hagrid’s cabin looked like an iced cake.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
“The four brothers and three sisters were by all accounts a formidable team who rarely lost a match, partly, it is said, because of the intimidation felt by opposing teams at the sight of Walter standing on the sidelines with a wand in one hand and a meat cleaver in the other.”
J. K. Rowling
Quidditch Through the Ages
“The full list of these fouls, however, has never been made available to the wizarding public. It is the Department’s view that witches and wizards who see the list ‘might get ideas’.”
J. K. Rowling
Quidditch Through the Ages
“The great majority of you belong to the world’s only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way behind your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.”
J. K. Rowling
Very Good Lives
“The heroes and heroines who triumph in his stories are not those with the most powerful magic, but rather those who demonstrate the most kindness, common sense and ingenuity.”
J. K. Rowling
The Tales of Beedle the Bard
“The idea of a teenage Dumbledore was simply odd, like trying to imagine a stupid Hermione or a friendly Blast-Ended Skrewt.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
“The inner eye does not see upon command.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
“The instantaneous shift from calm to calamity. The slowing of time. Every sense suddenly wire-taut and screaming.”
J. K. Rowling
The Silkworm
“The kindest interpretation would be: ‘Hope springs eternal.”
J. K. Rowling
The Tales of Beedle the Bard
“The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity.”
J. K. Rowling
Very Good Lives
“The memory of him telling her she was his best friend caused a little spurt of happiness every time she returned to it.”
J. K. Rowling
Troubled Blood
“The mind is a complex and many-layered thing, Potter… or at least, most minds are…”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
“The mind is not a book, to be opened at will and examined at leisure. Thoughts are not etched on the inside of skulls, to be perused by an invader. The mind is a complex and many-layered thing.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
“The ministry has fallen. Scrimgeour is dead. They are coming.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
“The mistake ninety-nine percent of humanity made, as far as Fats could see, was being ashamed of what they were; lying about it, trying to be somebody else.”
J. K. Rowling
The Casual Vacancy
“The older I’ve grown, the more I’ve realized that the team is everything. Qualifications and experience are important, but if the team doesn’t gel forget it! You’ll never achieve what you should.”
J. K. Rowling
Troubled Blood
“The ones who love us never really leave us, you can always find them in here.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
“The scar had not pained Harry for nineteen years. All was well.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
“The silence was unbearable to him. If the pictures could have reflected the feelings inside him, they would have been screaming in pain.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
“The story, like all the best stories, split like an amoeba, forming an endless series of new stories and opinion pieces and speculative articles, each spawning its own counter chorus.”
J. K. Rowling
Career of Evil
“The thing about growing up with Fred and George,” said Ginny thoughtfully, “is that you sort of start thinking anything’s possible if you’ve got enough nerve.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
“The trouble is, humans do have a knack of choosing precisely those things that are worst for them.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
“The truth is a beautiful and terrible thing, and should therefore be treated with great caution.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
“The whole world’s writing novels, but nobody’s reading them.”
J. K. Rowling
The Silkworm
“The world isn’t split into good people and Death Eaters.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
“Their reward for enduring the awful experience was the right to tell people about it.”
J. K. Rowling
The Casual Vacancy
“Then he closed his eyes, and like millions of his fellow humans, wondered why troubles could never come singly, but in avalanches, so that you became increasingly destabilized with every blow that hit you.”
J. K. Rowling
Troubled Blood
“Then she was kissing him as she had never kissed him before…and it was blissful oblivion, better than firewhisky; she was the only real thing in the world.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
“There are no strange creatures, only blinkered people”
J. K. Rowling
Fantastic Beasts – The Crimes of Grindelwald
“There are some things you can’t share without ending up liking each other, and knocking out a twelve-foot mountain troll is one of them.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
“There is no good and evil, there is only power and those too weak to seek it.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
“There was a brief silence in which the distant echo of Hagrid smashing down a wooden front door seemed to reverberate through the intervening years.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
“There’s a silence. A perfect, profound, silence. One that sits low, twists a bit, and has damage within it.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
“There’s no guarantee breeding two shits together will produce a third shit. I’ve known decent people who were raised by complete bastards, and vice versa.”
J. K. Rowling
Troubled Blood
“There’s people who’d expect you to take a bullet for them and they don’t bother rememb’ring yuh name.”
J. K. Rowling
The Cuckoo’s Calling
“They don’t disappear, the dead. It’d be easier if they did. I can see her so clearly. If she walked up those steps now, part of me wouldn’t be surprised. She was such a vivid person.”
J. K. Rowling
Troubled Blood
“They lived in the happiest kingdom in the world. What harm could the Ickabog do?”
J. K. Rowling
The Ickabog
“They were great men, with huge flaws, and you know what – those flaws almost made them greater.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
“They’re evacuating the younger kids and everyone’s meeting in the Great Hall to get organized. We’re fighting.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
“Things we lose have a way of coming back to us in the end, if not always in the way we expect.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
“This exchange marked the beginning of Mr. Malfoy’s long campaign to have me removed from my post as headmaster of Hogwarts, and of mine to have him removed from his position as Lord Voldemort’s Favorite Death Eater. My response prompted several further letters from Mr. Malfoy, but as they consisted mainly of opprobrious remarks on my sanity, parentage, and hygiene, their relevance to this commentary is remote.”
J. K. Rowling
The Tales of Beedle the Bard
“Those we love never truly leave us, Harry. There are things that death cannot touch.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
“Those who did not know the ocean well forgot its solidity, its brutality.”
J. K. Rowling
Career of Evil
“Though they spent so much time trying to make themselves beautiful, you were not supposed to admit to women that beauty mattered.”
J. K. Rowling
The Silkworm
“To be a hero; sometimes, all it takes is having your heart in the right place.”
J. K. Rowling
Short Stories from Hogwarts of Heroism, Hardship and Dangerous Hobbies
“To hurt is as human as to breathe.”
J. K. Rowling
The Tales of Beedle the Bard
“To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
“Tuesday. Hot. That lot from across the marsh have been at it again. Playing a stupid game on their broomsticks. A big leather ball landed in my cabbages. I hexed the man who came for it. I’d like to see him fly with his knees on back to front, the great hairy hog.”
J. K. Rowling
Quidditch Through the Ages
“Tuesday. Wet. Was out on the marsh picking nettles. Broomstick idiots playing again. Watched for a bit from behind a rock. They’ve got a new ball. Throwing it to each other and trying to stick it in trees at either end of the marsh. Pointless rubbish.”
J. K. Rowling
Quidditch Through the Ages
“Tuesday. Windy. Gwenog came for nettle tea, then invited me out for a treat. Ended up watching those numbskulls playing their game on the marsh. That big Scottish warlock from up the hill was there. Now they’ve got two big heavy rocks flying around trying to knock them all off their brooms. Unfortunately didn’t happen while I was watching. Gwenog told me she often played herself. Went home in disgust.”
J. K. Rowling
Quidditch Through the Ages
“Understanding is the first step to acceptance, and only with acceptance can there be recovery.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
“Unlike any other creature on this planet, human beings can learn and understand without having experienced.”
J. K. Rowling
Very Good Lives
“Voldemort himself created his worst enemy, just as tyrants everywhere do! Have you any idea how much tyrants fear the people they oppress? All of them realize that, one day, amongst their many victims, there is sure to be one who rises against them and strikes back!”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
“Was it love when somebody filled a space in your life that yawned inside you, once they had gone?”
J. K. Rowling
The Casual Vacancy
“We are only as strong as we are united, as weak as we are divided.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
“We aren’t our mistakes. It’s what we do about the mistake that shows who we are.”
J. K. Rowling
Troubled Blood
“We cannot protect the young from harm. Pain must and will come.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
“We can’t choose our fate, but we can choose others. Be careful in knowing that.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
“We do not need magic to transform our world. We carry all of the power we need inside ourselves already.”
J. K. Rowling
Very Good Lives
“We don’t love each other; we love the idea we have of each other. Very few humans understand this or can bear to contemplate it. They have blind faith in their own powers of creation. All love, ultimately, is self-love.”
J. K. Rowling
The Silkworm
“We don’t love each other; we love the idea we have of each other.”
J. K. Rowling
The Silkworm
“We’ve been so busy trying to rewrite our own pasts, we’ve blighted their present.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
“We’ve covered power and politics in the wizarding world sensibly and thoroughly. But to end on something altogether more uplifting, let’s take a look at the potent presence of Peeves the poltergeist. If there were an unpopularity contest among the staff and students of Hogwarts, surely Peeves would at least be a finalist in the ‘nuisance’ category?”
J. K. Rowling
Short Stories from Hogwarts of Power, Politics and Pesky Poltergeists
“Well, I think there’s a kind of poetry to astrology. I’m not saying it works, but there’s a kind of – of symmetry to it, an order. It makes a kind of – not literal sense, but it’s survived for a reason. I think it makes you feel less lonely. Astrology connects you to the universe, doesn’t it?”
J. K. Rowling
Troubled Blood
“We’re all human, aren’t we? Every human life is worth the same, and worth saving.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
“What happened down in the dungeons between you and Professor Quirrell is a complete secret, so, naturally the whole school knows.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
“What is more, those who choose not to empathize enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it through our own apathy.”
J. K. Rowling
Very Good Lives
“What must strike any intelligent witch or wizard on studying the so-called history of the Elder Wand is that every man who claims to have owned it has insisted that it is “unbeatable,” when the known facts of its passage through many owners’ hands demonstrate that has it not only been beaten hundreds of times, but that it also attracts trouble as Grumble the Grubby Goat attracted flies.”
J. K. Rowling
The Tales of Beedle the Bard
“Whatever happens to your body, your soul will survive, untouched…”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
“When Rose came up to me today in Potions and called me Bread Head I almost hugged her. No, there’s no almost about it, I actually tried to hug her, and then she kicked me in the shin.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
“When she tallied kindness she subtracted abandonment.”
J. K. Rowling
The Casual Vacancy
“When spares are spared, when time is turned, when unseen children murder their fathers: Then will the Dark Lord return.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
“When you are young, and beautiful, you can be very cruel.”
J. K. Rowling
The Cuckoo’s Calling
“When you have seen as much of life as I have, you will not underestimate the power of obsessive love.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
“Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
“While there have been no proven referee slayings since, there have been several incidences of broom-tampering over the centuries, the most dangerous being the transformation of the referee’s broom into a Portkey, so that he or she is whisked away from the match halfway through and turns up months later in the Sahara Desert.”
J. K. Rowling
Quidditch Through the Ages
“While we may come from different places and speak in different tongues, our hearts beat as one.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
“Why did he need orphanages, you ask? Well, in the first place, quite a number of parents were being killed or imprisoned. As everyone was now finding it difficult to feed their own families, they weren’t able to take in the abandoned children. In the second place, poor people were dying of hunger. As parents usually fed their children rather than themselves, children were often the last of the family left alive. And in the third place, some heartbroken, homeless families were giving up their children to orphanages, because it was the only way they could make sure their children would have food and shelter.”
J. K. Rowling
The Ickabog
“Why would I go looking for someone I know wants to kill me?”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
“Why, dear boy, we don’t send wizards to Azkaban just for blowing up their aunts.”
J. K. Rowling
“Why’re there people like me at all, Cormoran? Why’s evolution let it happen? Because humans are so highly developed, we can only thin ourselves out with intraspecies predators. Pick off the weak, the morally depraved. It’s a good thing that degenerate, drunk women don’t breed. That’s just a fact, it’s a fact.”
J. K. Rowling
Troubled Blood
“With beyond measure is man’s greatest treasure.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
“With the fall of Lord Voldemort, Dolores Umbridge was put on trial for her enthusiastic co-operation with his regime, and convicted of the torture, imprisonment and deaths of several people (some of the innocent Muggle-borns she sentenced to Azkaban did not survive their ordeal).”
J. K. Rowling
Short Stories from Hogwarts of Power, Politics and Pesky Poltergeists
“Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic. Capable of both inflicting injury, and remedying it.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
“Yeah, Quirrell was a great teacher. There was just that minor drawback of him having Lord Voldemort sticking out of the back of his head!”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
“Yeah, we’ll call you,” muttered Ron as the knight disappeared, “If we ever need someone mental.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
“You are not writing properly unless someone is bleeding, probably you.”
J. K. Rowling
The Silkworm
“You are the true master of death, because the true master does not seek to run away from Death. He accepts that be must die, and understands that there are far, far worse things in the living world than dying.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
“You ask me, of all people, how to protect a boy in terrible danger? We cannot protect the young from harm. Pain must and will come.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
“You can bloody hate someone and still wish they gave a shit about you and hate yourself for wishing it.”
J. K. Rowling
Lethal White
“You can exist without your soul, you know, as long as your brain and heart are still working. But you’ll have no sense of self anymore, no memory, no… anything. There’s no chance at all of recovery. You’ll just — exist. As an empty shell. And your soul is gone forever…lost.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
“You can laugh! But people used to believe there were no such things as the Blibbering Humdinger or the Crumple-Horned Snorkack!”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
“You can’t plot murder like a novel. There are always loose ends in real life.”
J. K. Rowling
The Silkworm
“You care so much you feel as though you will bleed to death with the pain of it.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
“You could find beauty nearly anywhere if you stopped to look for it, but the battle to get through the days made it easy to forget that this totally cost-free luxury existed.”
J. K. Rowling
Career of Evil
“You fail to recognize that it matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be!”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
“You haven’t got a letter on yours,” George observed. “I suppose she thinks you don’t forget your name. But we’re not stupid-we know we’re called Gred and Forge.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
“You know it’s the strangest of things, but ever since being in the scariest place imaginable I’m pretty much good with fear. I am — Scorpius the Dreadless. I am — Malfoy the Unanxious.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
“You know, Minister, I disagree with Dumbledore on many counts…but you cannot deny he’s got style…”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
“You know, there’s pride, and then there’s stupidity”
J. K. Rowling
The Silkworm
“You look in excellent health to me, Potter, so you will excuse me if I don’t let you off homework today. I assure you that if you do die, you need not hand it in.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
“You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.”
J. K. Rowling
Very Good Lives
“You must accept the reality of other people. You think that reality is up for negotiation, that we think it’s whatever you say it is. You must accept that we are as real as you are; you must accept that you are not God.”
J. K. Rowling
The Casual Vacancy
“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 plainly when you have need of him.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
“You will also find that help will always be given at Hogwarts to those who ask for it.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
“You will find that I will only truly have left this school when none here are loyal to me.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
“You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity.”
J. K. Rowling
Very Good Lives
“You’re not supposed to dislike your own child. You were supposed to like them no matter what, even if they were not what you wanted.”
J. K. Rowling
The Casual Vacancy
“Your devotion is nothing more than cowardice. You would not be here if you had anywhere else to go.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
“Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
“You’ve got to appreciate what the worst is. You don’t want to find yourself in a situation where you’re facing it.”
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
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