10 Brilliant JK Rowling Quotes That Are NOT From The Harry Potter Books

31st July, is a double birthday for Potterheads – Harry Potter “born as the seventh month dies” and the creator of the books, JK Rowling. Here are 10 Rowling quotes not from the HP books.

The Harry Potter books are a huge thing in literary circles, and JK Rowling may have singlehandedly made reading cool again for kids who have now grown up to be adults. She has not written just the Harry Potter books, but also the Fantastic Beasts series based on the same magical world, a standalone literary fiction book The Casual Vacancy, and a crime fiction series under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. Plus there are Harry Potter’s textbooks Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, and Quidditch through the Ages, and the book of children’s tales told to magical children in her Harry Potter series – Tales of Beedle the Bard. Quite a body of work. Going by her tweets, she’s writing more for children.

Beyond her books she has contributed a whole lot of backstories of the Harry Potter series characters on Pottermore.

While there are a whole lot of sentences that can be quoted from the books, there are also some inspiring and thought-provoking quotes that are from sources beyond the books. So here’s a post looking at 15 of these.

One

“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 have failed by default.”

Two

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

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Three

“Those who choose not to empathise enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.”

Four

“I would like to be remembered as someone who did the best she could with the talent she had.”

Five

“As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.”

Six

“I’ve got two daughters who will have to make their way in this skinny-obsessed world, and it worries me, because I don’t want them to be empty-headed, self-obsessed, emaciated clones; I’d rather they were independent, interesting, idealistic, kind, opinionated, original, funny – a thousand things, before ‘thin.'”

Seven

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

Eight

“We do not need magic to transform our world. We carry all the power we need inside ourselves already. We have the power to imagine better.”

Nine

“I think writing about the time in Hermione’s life that I write about – growing from childhood into womanhood, literally, I think it brought back to me how very difficult it is. So much is expected of you as you become a woman, and often you are asked to sacrifice parts of you in becoming a girl, I would say. Hermione doesn’t.”

Ten

“I don’t believe in the kind of magic in my books. But I do believe something very magical can happen when you read a good book.”

Eleven

“There is an expiry 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.”

Twelve

“There’s always room for a story that can transport people to another place.”

Thirteen

“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.”

Fourteen

“Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s places.”

Fifteen

“Books are like mirrors: if a fool looks in, you cannot expect a genius to look out.”

Header image source: By Executive Office of the President [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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