J.K. Rowling
See also: Robert Galbraith
Although she writes under the pen name J.K. Rowling, pronounced like rolling, her name when her first Harry Potter book was published was simply Joanne Rowling. Anticipating that the target audience of young boys might not want to read a book written by a woman, her publishers demanded that she use two initials, rather than her full name. As she had no middle name, she chose K as the second initial of her pen name, from her paternal grandmother Kathleen Ada Bulgen Rowling. She calls herself Jo and has said, "No one ever called me 'Joanne' when I was young, unless they were angry." Following her marriage, she has sometimes used the name Joanne Murray when conducting personal business. During the Leveson Inquiry she gave evidence under the name of Joanne Kathleen Rowling. In a 2012 interview, Rowling noted that she no longer cared that people pronounced her name incorrectly.
Rowling was born to Peter James Rowling, a Rolls-Royce aircraft engineer, and Anne Rowling (née Volant), on 31 July 1965 in Yate, Gloucestershire, England, 10 miles (16 km) northeast of Bristol. Her mother Anne was half-French and half-Scottish. Her parents first met on a train departing from King's Cross Station bound for Arbroath in 1964. They married on 14 March 1965. Her mother's maternal grandfather, Dugald Campbell, was born in Lamlash on the Isle of Arran. Her mother's paternal grandfather, Louis Volant, was awarded the Croix de Guerre for exceptional bravery in defending the village of Courcelles-le-Comte during the First World War.
Rowling's sister Dianne was born at their home when Rowling was 23 months old. The family moved to the nearby village Winterbourne when Rowling was four. She attended St Michael's Primary School, a school founded by abolitionist William Wilberforce and education reformer Hannah More. Her headmaster at St Michael's, Alfred Dunn, has been suggested as the inspiration for the Harry Potter headmaster Albus Dumbledore.
As a child, Rowling often wrote fantasy stories, which she would usually then read to her sister. She recalls that: "I can still remember me telling her a story in which she fell down a rabbit hole and was fed strawberries by the rabbit family inside it. Certainly the first story I ever wrote down (when I was five or six) was about a rabbit called Rabbit. He got the measles and was visited by his friends, including a giant bee called Miss Bee." At the age of nine, Rowling moved to Church Cottage in the Gloucestershire village of Tutshill, close to Chepstow, Wales. When she was a young teenager, her great aunt, who Rowling said "taught classics and approved of a thirst for knowledge, even of a questionable kind," gave her a very old copy of Jessica Mitford's autobiography, Hons and Rebels. Mitford became Rowling's heroine, and Rowling subsequently read all of her books.
Rowling has said of her teenage years, in an interview with The New Yorker, "I wasn’t particularly happy. I think it’s a dreadful time of life." She had a difficult homelife; her mother was ill and she had a difficult relationship with her father (she is no longer on speaking terms with him). She attended secondary school at Wyedean School and College, where her mother had worked as a technician in the science department. Rowling said of her adolescence, "Hermione [a bookish, know-it-all Harry Potter character] is loosely based on me. She's a caricature of me when I was eleven, which I'm not particularly proud of." Steve Eddy, who taught Rowling English when she first arrived, remembers her as "not exceptional" but "one of a group of girls who were bright, and quite good at English." Sean Harris, her best friend in the Upper Sixth owned a turquoise Ford Anglia, which she says inspired the one in her books.
“She's alive, but only just.”
“Running at Ron, she flung them around his neck and kissed him full on the mouth. Ron threw away the fangs and broomstick he was holding and responded with such enthusiasm that he lifted Hermione off her feet.”
“Depression isn't just being a bit sad. It's feeling nothing. It's not wanting to be alive anymore.”
“You should have told her differently,' said Hermione, still with that maddeningly patient air. 'You should have said it was really annoying, but I'd made you promise to come along to the Three Broomsticks, and you really didn't want to go, you'd much rather spend the whole day with her, but unfortunately you thought you really ought to meet me and would she please, please come along with you, and hopefully you'd be able to get away more quickly? And it might have been a good idea to mention how ugly you think I am too,' Hermione added as an afterthought.'But I don't think you're ugly,' said Harry, bemused.Hermione laughed.”
“I seem to remember telling you both that I would have to expel you if you broke any more school rules,” said Dumbledore.Ron opened his mouth in horror.“Which goes to show that the best of us must sometimes eat our words,” Dumbledore went on, smiling.”
“Choice was dangerous: you had to forgo all other possibilities when you chose.”
“Her face was a synthesis of perfect symmetry and unusual proportion; he could have gazed at it for hours, trying to locate the source of its fascination.”
“I—I didn't think—""That," said Professor McGonagall, "is obvious.”
“They may not look dangerous, but if angered [bowtruckles] will gouge out human eyes with their fingers, which, as you can see, are very sharp and not at all desirable near the eyeballs.”
“Parvati positively beamed. Harry could tell that she was feeling guilty for having laughed at Hermione in Transfiguration. He looked around and saw that Hermione was beaming back, if possible even more brightly. Girls were very strange sometimes.”
“Knocking the shrieking goblins aside like skittles”
“Simon had the child's belief that the rest of the world exists as staging for their personal drama; destiny hung over him, casting clues and signs in his path, and he could not help feeling that ha had been vouchsafed a sign, a celestial wink.”
“Was it love when somebody filled a space in your life that yawned inside you, once they had gone?”
“How desperate she had been for a storybook ending, and a life to which Gaia would always want to return; because her daughter's departure was hurtling towards Kay like a meteorite, and she foresaw the loss of Gaia as a calamity that would shatter her world.”
“She seemed to be trying to take in what Kay had said to her: this bizarre, dangerous advice about telling the truth”
“He wanted to journey through dark labyrinths and wrestle with the strangeness that lurked within; he wanted to crack open piety and expose hypocrisy; he wanted to break taboos and squeeze wisdom from their bloody hearts; he wanted to achieve a state of amoral grace, and be baptized backwards into ignorance and simplicity.”
“Divination is turning out to be much more trouble than I could have foreseen, never having studied the subject myself.”
“Yeah, he's off to the Chamber of Secrets for a cup of tea with his fanged servant.”
“And then he heard Mad-Eye Moody’s voice, echoing in some distant chamber of his empty brain: Jump onto the desk . . . jump onto the desk. . . .Harry bent his knees obediently, preparing to spring.Jump onto the desk. . . .Why, though? Another voice had awoken in the back of his brain.Stupid thing to do, really, said the voice.Jump onto the desk. . . .No, I don’t think I will, thanks, said the other voice, a little more firmly . . . no, I don’t really want to . . .Jump! NOW!The next thing Harry felt was considerable pain. He had both jumped and tried to prevent himself from jumping — the result was that he’d smashed headlong into the desk, knocking it over, and, by the feeling in his legs, fractured both his kneecaps.”
“You have to be free to fail in this world.”
“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.”
“She was actively frightened of imparting confidences, because she feared that they might betray the world of oddness that lived inside her”
“She thought of sex with Miles. It had last happened three weeks previously. His performance was as predictable as a Masonic handshake.”
“He had thought then of the nature of justice as he had come to know it: of his father as a pagan god, and of his mother as the high priestess of the cult, who attempted to interpret and intercede, usually failing, yet still insisting, in the face of all the evidence, that there was an underlying magnanimity and reasonableness to her deity.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Stone dead," said Howard, as though there were degrees of deadness, and the kind that Barry Fairbrother had contracted was particularly sordid.”
“Howard and Shirley were clothed, always, in an invisible layer of decorum that they never laid aside.”
“Whenever he was in company he wanted to get away, and whenever he was alone he wanted company.”
“From here on in, Harry, I may be as woefully wrong as Humphrey Belcher who believed the time was ripe for a cheese cauldron.”
“If there is one thing Voldemort cannot understand, it is love.”
“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.”
“Then you will find yourself easy prey for the Dark Lord!" said Snape savagely. "Fools who wear their hearts proudly on their sleeves, who cannot control their emotions, who wallow in sad memories and allow themselves to be provoked so easily - weak people, in other words - they stand no chance against his powers! He will penetrate your mind with absurd ease, Potter!”
“I wanted my children to grow up where I grew up, to have proper roots in a culture as old and magnificent as Britain’s; to be citizens, with everything that implies, of a real country...”
“You foul, lying, evil little cockroach!”
“To Harry Potter — the boy who lived!”
“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.”
“Yeah,” said Harry. “No more pretending we care what happens when Jupiter and Uranus get too friendly . . .”“And from now on, I don’t care if my tea leaves spell die, Ron, die — I’m just chucking them in the bin where they belong.”
“I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom:As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.”
“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.”
“Dark times lie ahead of us and there will be a time when we must choose between what is easy and what is right.-Albus Dumbledore”
“I've decided to call him Norbert,' said Hagrid, looking at the dragon with misty eyes. 'He really knows me now, watch. Norbert! Norbert! Where's Mummy?''He's lost his marbles,' Ron muttered in Harry's ear.'Hagrid,' said Harry loudly, 'give it a fortnight and Norbert's going to be as big as your house. Malfoy could go to Dumbledore at any moment.Hagrid bit his lip.'I- I know I can't jus' dump him, I can't.'Harry suddenly turned to Ron.'Charlie,' he said.'You're losing it too,' said Ron. 'I'm Ron, remember?”
“The presence of hundreds of books had finally convinced Hermione that what they were doing was right.”
“No,” said Hermione shortly. “Have either of you seen my copy of Numerology and Gramatica?”“Oh, yeah, I borrowed it for a bit of bedtime reading,” said Ron, but very quietly.”
“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.”
“Potter is mocked by a faculty member for the idea that there is evil in the world from which even children need to learn to defend themselves by the actual practice of doing so rather than familiarity with theory.”