J. K. Rowling: “Happiness can be found even in the darkest of times – you just need to turn on the light”

Her books have an amazing ability – they act like living water, give a feeling of home, security, hope. Almost 20 years have passed since the publication of the first book about an orphan boy who does not know that he is a wizard, but children and adults around the world still draw strength from JK Rowling’s books. Favorite quotes roam in diaries, social networks, are selected for tattoos.

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• Why do we read Harry Potter books?

“If you really want to know a person, look at how he treats those who are weaker than him, and not those who are equal to him.”

“It takes great courage to stand up to enemies, but it takes no less courage to stand up to friends.”

“We all have both darkness and light inside. The main thing is which part we decide to rely on when it comes time to act.

“To dwell on dreams and neglect life – nothing good will come of it.”

“Don’t pity the dead, Harry. Pity the living, and especially those who live without love.

“Of course it’s happening in your head, Harry, but what makes you think it can’t be part of reality because of that?”

“Our choice, Harry, says a lot more about who we really are than our abilities.”

“You’re a good man, Harry, who’s had a lot of bad things happen to him.”

Fifteen-year-old American girl Cassidy Stay, who in 2014 lost her entire family – her mother, father, two sisters and two brothers – during a shootout in Texas, quoted the headmaster of the School of Witchcraft and Wizardry Albus Dumbledore at the memorial service:

“Happiness can be found even in the darkest of times, if only one remembers to turn on the light.”

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• Harry Potter books teach tolerance

Rowling herself wrote her first book during the most difficult period of her life – after the death of her mother, a short marriage that plunged her and her tiny daughter into poverty – and the work helped to get rid of grief. “Mom’s death,” she would later say, “is invisibly present on every page of Harry Potter. A good half of Harry’s adventures is a journey towards death, in its various guises, how death changes life, what it means to die, what is stronger than death – every book of the saga is filled with all this.

Writing helped Rowling cope with depression. “The depression started after my mother died – twenty-five to twenty-eight were my darkest years. You don’t feel anything, not even a glimmer of hope that things will ever get better. It is difficult to describe this feeling to someone who has never experienced it. This is not sadness. There is nothing wrong with sadness. You cry – it means you feel. When there are no feelings, they seem to be frozen – really scary. This is the Dementors (in the Harry Potter saga – creatures that suck out the soul. – Approx. ed.).

Today, the writer says that she is grateful to fate for that difficult time. She doesn’t romanticize poverty—life on welfare with a newborn baby was scary, dreary, and humiliating. “I was a single mother … I remember how I denied myself food to feed my daughter … evenings when we sat without a penny, in the truest sense of the word, and my dinner was a single cookie. I was afraid to inadvertently ruin something in the house, to press the wrong button and lose everything. When you don’t have money, you lose your individuality, I’ve experienced that first hand.”

But having reached the bottom, she managed to push off from him. “Failure is more important than success,” Rowling says. “Failure frees you from the superfluous, the unimportant. I stopped pretending to myself that I was someone else and focused all my energy on finishing the only job that mattered to me. I was still alive, I still had a little daughter that I adored, and an old typewriter, and the stone bottom became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

The preface contains a line from a poem by the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore.