Explore Quotes by J. K. Rowling

And what will you give me in return, Severus?' 'In - in return?' Snape gaped at Dumbledore, and Harry expected him to protest, but after a long moment he said, 'Anything.

You have to be free to fail in this world.

Stone dead," said Howard, as though there were degrees of deadness, and the kind that Barry Fairbrother had contracted was particularly sordid.

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.

Both could feel the relationship crumbling to pieces beneath the weight of everything that Gavin refused to say.

He sobbed in desperation at the burden of fear he carried with him every day of his life.

Parminder kept her unwept tears locked tightly inside where they seemed to undergo an alchemical transformation, returning to the outer world as lava slides of rage.

She was actively frightened of imparting confidences, because she feared that they might betray the world of oddness that lived inside her

Howard and Shirley were clothed, always, in an invisible layer of decorum that they never laid aside.

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.

Naturally Shirley had known, as they slid stock words and phrases back and forth between them like beads on an abacus, that Howard must be as brimful of ecstasy as she was; but to express these feelings out loud, when the news of death was still fresh in the air, would have been tantamount to dancing naked and shrieking obscenities, and Howard and Shirley were clothed, always, in an invisible layer of decorum that they never laid aside.

Krystal flung herself violently off the chair, away from her mother. She was surprised to feel warm liquid flowing down her cheeks, and thought confusedly of blood, but it was tears, only tears, clear and shining on her fingertips when she wiped them away.

I think it’s the books that you read when you’re young that live with you forever.

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.

The world had ended, so why had the battle not ceased, the castle fallen silent in horror, and every combatant laid down their arms?

He gave everything to everybody. Except to me.

She navigated away from the Parish Council message board and dropped into her favorite medical website, where she painstakingly entered the words "brain" and "death" in the search box. The suggestions were endless. Shirley scrolled through the possibilities, her mild eyes rolling up and down, wondering to which of these deadly conditions, some of them unpronounceable, she owed her present happiness.

She kept asking herself whether, if he had looked cleaner, she might have been more concerned; whether, on some subliminal level, she had confused his obvious signs of neglect with street-smartness, toughness and resilience.

She had a way of moving that moved him as much as music, which was what moved him most of all. Surely the spirit animating that pearless body must be unusual too? Why would nature make a vessel like that, if not to contain something still more valuable?

Things denied, things untold, things hidden and disguised.

First think of the person who lives in disguise, Who deals in secrets and tells naught but lies. Next, tell me what's always the last thing to mend, The middle of middle and the end of end? And finally give me the sound often heard During the search for a hard-to-find word. Now string them together, and answer me this, Which creature would you be unwilling to kiss?