Harry, a History Quotes

“...she wasn't reading Deathly Hallows at all. Her book wasn't orange but rose and water and sand, and featured a kid on a broomstick and white unicorn. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. She didn't notice me staring at her.

'Oh, I envy you,' I thought, but was smiling for her. She had just begun.”
― Melissa Anelli, Harry, a History: The True Story of a Boy Wizard, His Fans, and Life Inside the Harry Potter Phenomenon

“Harry Potter has actually been a very intimate phenomenon, the story of small groups of people acting in ways they shouldn't, doing things they usually wouldn't, and making the kind of history that, without Harry, they pretty much couldn't.”
― Melissa Anelli, Harry, a History: The True Story of a Boy Wizard, His Fans, and Life Inside the Harry Potter Phenomenon

“What does she (J. K. Rowling) hope people will take with them about this time?
“When all the fuss and hoopla dies away, and when all the press commentary dies away, I think it will be seen that this phenomenon was generated, in the first instance, by kids loving a book. A book went on shelves, and a few people loved it. When all of the smoke and lights die away, that’s what you’ll be left with.
“And that’s the most wonderful thought for an author.”
― Melissa Anelli, Harry, a History: The True Story of a Boy Wizard, His Fans, and Life Inside the Harry Potter Phenomenon

“I had to show Teddy Lupin was okay. I hated killing Lupin and Tonks. Hated it. Hated it. But I was writing about war. That’s what war does. It leaves little, newborn babies who never know . . .”
― Melissa Anelli, Harry, A History - The True Story of a Boy Wizard, His Fans, and Life Inside the Harry Potter Phenomenon

“Every magazine I picked up was about weight. The sick thing [is it’s] women doing it to each other. It’s women who buy these . . . magazines. It’s women who buy them to look at other women’s arses on the beach. That’s the sick thing. Why are we doing it to each other, why?”
― Melissa Anelli, Harry, A History - The True Story of a Boy Wizard, His Fans, and Life Inside the Harry Potter Phenomenon

“I’m afraid that’s the nature of fiction. You have to accept someone else’s world because they made that world, so they probably know a little better than you do what goes on there. MA:”
― Melissa Anelli, Harry, A History - The True Story of a Boy Wizard, His Fans, and Life Inside the Harry Potter Phenomenon

“my model with Harry really was war veterans, who have seen horrors and are asked to go home and rebuild, and go back to ordinary life and care for a family, be a father, particularly being a father—difficult job, in troubled times—and I felt it would be a betrayal of my character if I did anything other than show him doing that.”
― Melissa Anelli, Harry, A History - The True Story of a Boy Wizard, His Fans, and Life Inside the Harry Potter Phenomenon

“the Nerdfighters (a term that means one fights for nerds, not against them); they frequently rail against vapidity and intellectual disengagement while celebrating the joys of being overenthusiastic about astrophysics or Magic:”
― Melissa Anelli, Harry, A History - The True Story of a Boy Wizard, His Fans, and Life Inside the Harry Potter Phenomenon

“this phenomenon was generated, in the first instance, by kids loving a book. A book went on shelves, and a few people loved it. When all of the smoke and lights die away, that’s what you’ll be left with. “And that’s the most wonderful thought for an author.”
― Melissa Anelli, Harry, A History - The True Story of a Boy Wizard, His Fans, and Life Inside the Harry Potter Phenomenon

“I had to show Teddy Lupin was okay. I hated killing Lupin and Tonks. Hated it. Hated it. But I was writing about war. That’s what war does. It leaves little, newborn babies who never know . . .” She trails off. “So, it happened to Harry, and it happened again. They let it happen again; they didn’t want to believe Harry. So I had to show that evil all over again.”
― Melissa Anelli, Harry, A History - The True Story of a Boy Wizard, His Fans, and Life Inside the Harry Potter Phenomenon

“Emerson had four questions scribbled on a scrap of paper torn from a notebook and that was it. Looking at his face I suddenly knew exactly how Hermione felt when Ron came beseeching her for last-minute help.”
― Melissa Anelli, Harry, A History - The True Story of a Boy Wizard, His Fans, and Life Inside the Harry Potter Phenomenon

“While asserting that Christians should “never apologize for rigorously scrutinizing what influences our children,” the editorial calls Harry Potter a “Book of Virtues with a preadolescent funny bone.” The literary witchcraft of the book “has almost no resemblance to the I-am-God mumbo jumbo of Wiccan circles,” and contains “wonderful examples of compassion, loyalty, courage, friendship and even self-sacrifice.” I”
― Melissa Anelli, Harry, A History - The True Story of a Boy Wizard, His Fans, and Life Inside the Harry Potter Phenomenon

“eleven types of magic found in the real world that are in Harry Potter, including divination, outer-body experience, and traveling through space and time.”
― Melissa Anelli, Harry, A History - The True Story of a Boy Wizard, His Fans, and Life Inside the Harry Potter Phenomenon

“providing me with something I could relate to in terms of struggling through hardships and loss. I can only hope this woman [Laura Mallory] realizes that she is not proving a point. She is merely insulting the people who she is using as her examples.”
― Melissa Anelli, Harry, A History - The True Story of a Boy Wizard, His Fans, and Life Inside the Harry Potter Phenomenon

“She’s cagey about her history, about names and dates, because of the verbal lashing she had received from a small portion of Potter fans:”
― Melissa Anelli, Harry, A History - The True Story of a Boy Wizard, His Fans, and Life Inside the Harry Potter Phenomenon

“there were any number of priests and clergy, one of whom was on my own staff on Leaky, who believed differently, and who had even used Harry Potter to illustrate the morals evoked in the Bible. That”
― Melissa Anelli, Harry, A History - The True Story of a Boy Wizard, His Fans, and Life Inside the Harry Potter Phenomenon

“the Pope and Father Gabriele Amorth, the Catholic Church’s chief exorcist, who have both spoken against Harry Potter in the media (the Pope did so before he became Pope, when he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and was a prefect for the congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a position frequently described as the Church’s devil’s advocate).”
― Melissa Anelli, Harry, A History - The True Story of a Boy Wizard, His Fans, and Life Inside the Harry Potter Phenomenon

“I don’t think we’re going to see Pope Benedict write an encyclical about Harry Potter any time in the near future, but his first encyclical was on the theme of love.” When”
― Melissa Anelli, Harry, A History - The True Story of a Boy Wizard, His Fans, and Life Inside the Harry Potter Phenomenon

“There are a lot of themes that I think are very compatible with Christian understanding . . . the themes of death, love, and sacrifice—these have been a part of good storytelling for ages and ages and ages, and certainly they are also very Christian themes.”
― Melissa Anelli, Harry, A History - The True Story of a Boy Wizard, His Fans, and Life Inside the Harry Potter Phenomenon

“One of the Christians who sees Harry as a positive moral influence is Father Stuart Crevcoure, a Roman Catholic priest with the Diocese of Tulsa, Oklahoma. A passionate Harry Potter fan, Crevcoure said the use of the occult in Potter doesn’t constitute a recruitment program for young pagans.”
― Melissa Anelli, Harry, A History - The True Story of a Boy Wizard, His Fans, and Life Inside the Harry Potter Phenomenon

“there have been minor flare-ups from the Greek and Bulgarian Orthodox churches as well. One”
― Melissa Anelli, Harry, A History - The True Story of a Boy Wizard, His Fans, and Life Inside the Harry Potter Phenomenon

“They were banned from use in private schools by the Ministry of Education in the United Arab Emirates because they were found to have values opposite to those of Islam,”
― Melissa Anelli, Harry, A History - The True Story of a Boy Wizard, His Fans, and Life Inside the Harry Potter Phenomenon

“In 1999, one attempt to ban readings of the Harry Potter books resulted in a civil student revolt. The fourth-graders in Zeeland, Michigan, who were subject to the ban wrote letters to the superintendent, asking him to repeal the restriction. When they learned how many other children from other locations shared their outrage, they formed Muggles for Harry Potter, an anticensorship group that almost immediately saw thousands of adolescent members grow from a grassroots campaign of Internet postings and paper petitions. The”
― Melissa Anelli, Harry, A History - The True Story of a Boy Wizard, His Fans, and Life Inside the Harry Potter Phenomenon

“Challenges don’t mean bannings: at most challenges are the record of a complaint,”
― Melissa Anelli, Harry, A History - The True Story of a Boy Wizard, His Fans, and Life Inside the Harry Potter Phenomenon

“sometimes the complaints had nothing to do with witchcraft or religion: the parents simply complained that the content was scaring the child.”
― Melissa Anelli, Harry, A History - The True Story of a Boy Wizard, His Fans, and Life Inside the Harry Potter Phenomenon

“usually parents just requested that teachers give them reading lists so that they could tell their children they had the option to leave the classroom when certain books were read aloud.”
― Melissa Anelli, Harry, A History - The True Story of a Boy Wizard, His Fans, and Life Inside the Harry Potter Phenomenon

“Jo Rowling has said she’s never had someone come up to her and thank her for their introduction to witchcraft.”
― Melissa Anelli, Harry, A History - The True Story of a Boy Wizard, His Fans, and Life Inside the Harry Potter Phenomenon

“Kodie, a late-teen juvenile delinquent from Terre Haute, Indiana, who was illiterate before he discovered the series; his foster mother Shirley Comer, a nurse, had started reading Harry Potter to him while he was in a juvenile rehabilitation center.”
― Melissa Anelli, Harry, A History - The True Story of a Boy Wizard, His Fans, and Life Inside the Harry Potter Phenomenon

“Kaitlin, had a substandard reading comprehension level before she started reading Harry Potter in late 1999. By the next year her grade level had been brought to normal, and she was enthusiastic about reading.”
― Melissa Anelli, Harry, A History - The True Story of a Boy Wizard, His Fans, and Life Inside the Harry Potter Phenomenon

“dyslexic children who’d fought to overcome their disability in order to read Harry and by doing so realized they could overcome dyslexia almost entirely.”
― Melissa Anelli, Harry, A History - The True Story of a Boy Wizard, His Fans, and Life Inside the Harry Potter Phenomenon