J. K. Rowling Quotes

I can no more reread my own books than I can watch old home movies or look at snapshots of myself as a child. I wind up sitting on the floor, paralyzed by grief and nostalgia.

After my grandfather died I went down to the basement of my family house where my family kept books, anthologies and things and there was an anthology without any names attached to it and I read a poem called Spellbound and I somehow attached it to my grandfather's death and I thought my grandfather had written it.

Every loss recapitulates earlier losses, but every affirmation of identity echoes earlier moments of clarity.

When I think about myself at 15, I can't relate to myself at all. I thought I knew everything.

I think what you notice most when you haven’t been home in a while is how much the trees have grown around your memories.

I was looking at the photographs and I started thinking that there was a time when these weren't memories.

You really can't go home again. Sometimes, that's a good thing. Sometimes, when you try, you find out that home isn't really there anymore... but that it wasn't only in your head before. Home actually existed. Home wasn't just a dream. Sometimes, that's the best thing of all.

My father passed away before he saw me perform. I can't help but wonder what he would think of all this. I go to a job in full makeup.

I'm 64 years old and, yeah, I went through a transition in my life last year, with the death of my son, that woke me up to a lot of things. You know, I'm perfectly happy in my own little groove. Marching along, building my company, and you know, a happy person.

That's a part of me going back to what I used to do.

To remember my values, I need to lose certain tastes and find other handles for the memories that they once helped me carry.

When 'Friday Night Lights' finished, I cried for a day. I have a problem.

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter into another!

I am now writing a book called 'Far Enough,' very loosely based on my childhood. This is difficult because it forces me to remember people I loved who are gone.

The roles I think about and can't stop thinking about - on the subway, when I'm riding my bike, when I'm running - are the things I connect to.

I think 'Lost' is like losing a friend or a relative or someone. You can't replace it with another one.

At some point I got sick of people calling me Bonzo junior. But now that I'm older and wiser, I'm just honored to be mentioned in the same breath.

Twenty years is, after all, a long time. We are not the same people we were. Old friends, lovers, even family members: they are strangers who happen to wear a familiar face. We have no right to claim to know anyone after such a distance.

Tell me the truth about death. I don't know what it is. We have them, then they are gone but they stay in our minds. Their stories are part of us as long as we live and as long as we tell them or write them down.

The reason you can never go home again isn't necessarily that places change, but people do. So nothing ever looks the same.

When I look at my old pictures, all I can see is what I used to be but am no longer. I think: What I can see is what I am not.

We aren't in high school. We aren't really in our families and we aren't in our houses. Those are the places we grew up and the times we spent together, but they aren't us. If think they are, then we're lost, because times end and places are lost. We aren't any place or any time . . . We are everywhere.

That is the saddest part when you lose someone you love - that person keeps changing. And later you wonder, Is this the same person I lost? Maybe you lost more maybe less, then thousand different things that come from your memory or imagination - and you do not know which is which, which was true, which is false.

I look back and think of all the times I've had to let things go in the past, and how traumatic it seemed while it was happening, but how my understanding of it changed as time passed - and oftentimes things that seem really difficult and traumatic in the short term seem a lot less difficult and traumatic in the long term. So I remind myself of that.

Going back after a long time will make you made, because the people you left behind do not like to think of you changed, will treat you as they always did, accuse you of being indifferent, when you are only different.