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.
“They were bullyin' him, Hermione, 'cause he's so small!" said Hagrid."Small?" said Hermione. "Small?""Hermione, I couldn't leave him," said Hagrid, tears now trickling down his bruised face into his beard. "See -- he's my brother!”
“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.”
“La grandeza inspira envidia, la envidia rencor y el rencor mentiras”
“La Indiferencia y la Frialdad, a veces, causan mucho más daño que la adversidad declarada”
“In March several of the Mandrakes threw a loud and raucous party in greenhouse three. This made Professor Sprout very happy.“The moment they start trying to move into each other’s pots, we’ll know they’re fully mature,” she told Harry.”
“Come out, come out, little Harry!" she called in her mock-baby voice, which echoed off the polished wooden floors. "What did you come after me for, then? I thought you were here to avenge my dear cousin!" "I am!" shouted Harry, and a score of ghostly Harrys seemed to chorus I am! I am! I am! all around the room. "Aaaaaah... did you love him, little baby Potter?"Hatred rose in Harry such as he had never known before. He flung himself out from behind the fountain and bellowed "Crucio!"Bellatrix screamed. The spell had knocked her off her feet, but she did not writhe and shriek with the pain as Neville had -- she was already on her feet again, breathless, no longer laughing. Harry dodged behind the garden fountain again -- her counterspell hit the head of the handsome wizard, which was blown off and landed twenty feet away, gouging long scratches into the wooden floor. "Never used an Unforgivable Curse before, have you, boy?" she yelled. She had abandoned her baby voice now. "You need to mean them, Potter! You need to really want to cause pain -- to enjoy it -- righteous anger won't hurt me for long -- I'll show you how it is done, shall I? I'll give you a lesson--!”
“Just because you’re allowed to use magic now you don’t have to whip your wands out for every tiny little thing!”
“George,” said Fred, “I think we’ve outgrown full-time education.”“Yeah, I’ve been feeling that way myself,” said George lightly.”
“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. Let them never be Stupid Girls.”
“He was going to be armed with his wand - which, just now, felt like nothing more than a narrow strip of wood - against a fifty-foot-high, scaly, spike-ridden, fire-breathing dragon.”
“The hook-nosed teacher looked past Quirrell’s turban straight into Harry’s eyes — and a sharp, hot pain shot across the scar on Harry’s forehead.”
“I have spied for you and lied for you, put myself in mortal danger for you. Everything was supposed to be to keep Lily Potter’s son safe. Now you tell me you have been raising him like a pig for slaughter —”
“And Harry, with the unerring skill of the Seeker, caught the wand in his free hand as Voldemort fell backward, arms splayed, the slit pupils of the scarlet eyes rolling upward. Tom Riddle hit the floor with a mundane finality, his body feeble and shrunken, the white hands empty, the snakelike face vacant and unknowing. Voldemort was dead, killed by his own rebounding curse, and Harry stood with two wands in his hands, staring down at his enemy's shell.”
“Hope springs forever.”
“Are — you — insane?” said Hermione in a hushed voice.'I don't think so,' said Harry, shrugging.”
“Why would I go looking for someone I know wants to kill me?”
“And now a chill settled over them where they stood, and Harry heard the rasping breath of the dementors that patrolled the outer trees. They would not affect him now. The fact of his own survival burned inside him, a talisman against them, as though his father's stag kept guardian in his heart.”
“He missed Hogwarts so much it was like having a constant stomachache. He missed the castle, with its secret passageways and ghosts, his classes, … the mail arriving by owl, eating banquets in the Great Hall, sleeping in his four-poster bed in the tower dormitory, visiting the gamekeeper, Hagrid, in his cabin next to the Forbidden Forest in the grounds, and especially, Quidditch, the most popular sport in the wizarding world”
“Don't count your owls before they are delivered.”
“You can't give a Dementor the old one-two!”
“It’s your one last chance,” said Harry, “it’s all you’ve got left. . . .I’ve seen what you’ll be otherwise. . . . Be a man . . . try . . . Try for some remorse. . . .”
“Always have a vivid imagination, for you never know when you might need it.”
“Vot is the point of being an international Quidditch player if all the good-looking girls are taken?”
“I have been careless, and so have been thwarted by luck and chance, those wreckers of all but the best laid plans.”
“Everything went pitch-black and the next thing I knew, I was being hurled headfirst out of the room!”“And you didn’t see that coming?” said Harry, unable to help himself.“No, I did not, as I say, it was pitch —” Professor Trelawny stopped and glared at him suspiciously.”
“Oh, come on, Harry,” said Hermione, suddenly impatient. “It’s not Quidditch that’s popular, it’s you! You’ve never been more interesting, and frankly, you’ve never been more fanciable.”
“The Prophet is bound to report the truth occasionally,' said Dumbledore, 'if only accidentally.”
“Which only goes to show that the best of us must sometimes eat our words,' Dumbledore went on, smiling.”
“I hate being poor.”
“Let my girls be Hermiones, rather than Pansy Parkinsons.”
“Thought we were supposed to be friends? Best friends?”“We are, Sev.”
“If you don’t like to read, you haven’t found the right book.”
“It is my baby and if I want to bring it out to play again, I will.”
“By the time she had interpreted Harry's dreams at the top of her voice (all of which, even the ones that involved eating porridge, apparently foretold a gruesome and early death), he was feeling much less sympathetic toward her.”
“And it’s Johnson, Johnson with the Quaffle, what a player that girl is, I’ve been saying it for years but she still won’t go out with me —''JORDAN!' yelled Professor McGonagall.'Just a fun fact, Professor, adds a bit of interest —”
“El problema es que los humanos tienen el don de elegir precisamente las cosas que son peores para ellos.”
“The point is, if we find out you’ve been horrible to Harry —”“— and make no mistake, we’ll hear about it.“even if you won’t let Harry use the fellytone —”“Telephone”
“Hermione, if Harry’s seen a Grim, that’s — that’s bad,” he said.“My — my uncle Bilius saw one and — and he died twenty-four hours later!”“Coincidence,” said Hermione airily, pouring herself some pumpkin juice.“You don’t know what you’re talking about!” said Ron, starting to get angry. “Grims scare the living daylights out of most wizards!” “There you are, then,” said Hermione in a superior tone. “They see the Grim and die of fright. The Grim’s not an omen, it’s the cause of death! And Harry’s still with us because he’s not stupid enough to see one and think, right, well, I’d better kick the bucket then!”
“Clever as I am, I remain just as big a fool as anyone else.”
“The trouble is, humans do have a knack of choosing precisely those things that are worst for them.”
“Death comes for us all in the end.”
“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!”
“Hello, Professor McGonagall,” said Moody calmly, bouncing the ferret still higher.“What — what are you doing?” said Professor McGonagall, her eyes following the bouncing ferret’s progress through the air.“Teaching,” said Moody.“Teach — Moody, is that a student?” shrieked Professor McGonagall, the books spilling out of her arms.“Yep,” said Moody.“Moody, we never use Transfiguration as a punishment!” said Professor McGonagall weakly.”
“All's fair in love and war," said Ron brightly, "and this is a bit of both.”
“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 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.”
“The stories we love best do live in us forever.”