If you fit the mold of the average GenTwenty reader (a twenty-something who likes to read), then you probably grew up with the Harry Potter series. J.K. Rowling seems to have a fitting quote for anything and everything, especially when it comes to creating your own magic. Below are 13 of my favorites.
13 Inspirational Quotes from J.K. Rowling to Get You Through Life
Body Positivity
“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’. And frankly, I’d rather they didn’t give a gust of stinking chihuahua flatulence whether the woman standing next to them has fleshier knees than they do. Let my girls be Hermiones, rather than Pansy Parkinsons.”
Creativity/ Protecting Your Time
“Be ruthless about protecting writing days, i.e., do not cave in to endless requests to have ‘essential’ and ‘long overdue’ meetings on those days. The funny thing is that, although writing has been my actual job for several years now, I still seem to have to fight for time in which to do it. Some people do not seem to grasp that I still have to sit down in peace and write the books, apparently believing that they pop up like mushrooms without my connivance. I must therefore guard the time allotted to writing as a Hungarian Horntail guards its first born egg.”
Achievements/ Success
“So given a Time-Turner, I’d tell my 21 self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a checklist of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life.”
Failure/ Hardship
“Failure is so important. We speak about success all the time. It is the ability to resist failure or use failure that often leads to greater success. I’ve met people who don’t want to try for fear of failing.”
“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.”
“The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive.”
“What’s coming will come and we’ll just have to meet it when it does.”
The Power of Story/ Reading
“My readers have to work with me to create the experience. They have to bring their imaginations to the story. No one sees a book in the same way, no one sees the characters the same way. As a reader you imagine them in your own mind. So, together, as author and reader, we have both created the story.”
People/ Loved Ones/ Community/ Friendship
“What’s most important in a friendship? Tolerance and loyalty.”
“Are you the sort of person who gloats when they see a woman fall, or the kind that celebrates a magnificent recovery?”
“One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor, down which I ventured at the age of eighteen in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: ‘What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality’. That is an astonishing statement, and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing.”
“The ones that love us never really leave us. You can always find them.”
Creating Your Own Magic
“If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; and if you choose to identify not only with the powerful but with the powerless; and if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.”
What’s your favorite J.K. Rowling (or any other author) quote?