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.
Category: J.K. Rowling
Joanne "Jo" Rowling, OBE FRSL (/ˈroʊlɪŋ/; born 31 July 1965), pen names J. K. Rowling and Robert Galbraith, is a British novelist best known as the author of the Harry Potter fantasy series.
I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.
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.
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.
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.
People find it far easier to forgive others for being wrong than being right.
“I make mistakes like the next man. In fact, being–forgive me–rather cleverer than most men, my mistakes tend to be correspondingly huger.”
Harry had known Hagrid to present a vicious baby dragon with a teddy bear, seen him croon over giant scorpions with suckers and stings, attempt to reason with his brutal giant of a half-brother, but this was perhaps the most incomprehensible of all his monster fancies: the gigantic talking spider, Ararog, that dwelled deep in the Forbidden Forest.
Harry did not usually lie in bed reading his textbooks; that sort of behaviour, as Ron rightly said, was indecent in anybody except Hermione, who was simply weird that way.
Harry and Cho were now too embarrassed to look at each other, let alone talk to each other; what if Ron and Hermione started going out together, then split up? Could their friendship survive it? Harry remembered the few weeks when they had not been talking to each other in third year; he had not enjoyed trying to bridge the distance between them. And then, what if they didn’t split up? What if they became like Bill and Fleur, and it became excrutiatingly embarrassing to be in their presence, so that he was shut out for good?
“You prat Ron, look at the state of her!”
“Ginny, don’t call Ron a prat, you’re not the captain of this team—”
“Well, you seemed too busy to call him a prat and I thought someone should.”
Christmas was approaching fast… and great bunches of mistletoe had been hung at intervals along the corridors. Large groups of girls tended to converge underneath the mistletoe bunches every time Harry went past, which caused blockages in the corridors; fortunately, however, Harry’s frequent night-time wanderings had given him an unusually good knowledge of the castle’s secret passageways.
“I’d love to go with you as friends! Nobody’s ever asked me to a party before, as a friend!”
I am a wizard, not a baboon brandishing a stick.
“Greatness inspires envy, envy engenders spite, spite spawns lies.”
Ah…I wondered when I would be meeting you. It seems only yesterday your mother and father were in here buying their first wands.