Explore Quotes by J. K. Rowling

Professor,” Harry gasped. “Your bird — I couldn’t do anything — he just caught fire —

Severus, please fetch me the strongest truth potion you posess, then go down to the kitchen and bring up the house elf called Winky. Minerva, kindly go down to Hagrids house where you will find a large black dog sitting in the pumpkin patch. Take the dog up to my office, tell him I will be with him shortly, then come back here.

You need your Inner Eye tested, if you ask me.

It is not about striving for immortality, but about accepting mortality.

Oh, he knows how to play, little bitty baby Potter.

The fact that you can feel pain like this is your greatest strength

I will if you go out with me, Evans

He was about to go home, about to return to the place where he had had a family. It was in Godric’s Hollow that, but for Voldemort, he would have grown up and spent every school holiday. He could have invited friends to his house. . . . He might even have had brothers and sisters. . . . It would have been his mother who had made his seventeenth birthday cake. The life he had lost had hardly ever seemed so real to him as at this moment, when he knew he was about to see the place where it had been taken from him.

Don't count your owls before they are delivered.

Always have a vivid imagination, for you never know when you might need it.

Let my girls be Hermiones, rather than Pansy Parkinsons.

If you don’t like to read, you haven’t found the right book.

Size is no guarantee of power.

The Ministry places a rather higher value on my life than yours, I’m afraid.

And he knew that at that moment, they understood each other perfectly, and when he told her what he was going to do now, she would not say ‘be careful’ or ‘don’t do it’, but she would accept his decision because she would not have expected anything less of him.

There you go, Harry!” Ron shouted over the noise. “You weren’t being thick after all — you were showing moral fiber!

All's fair in love and war," said Ron brightly, "and this is a bit of both.

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. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more than any qualification I ever earned.

Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it.

The stories we love best do live in us forever.

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.