Books

The 11 Most Profound & Heartbreaking Harry Potter Quotes About Grief

by Melissa Ragsdale
sammyreadsbooks/Instagram

Whenever I'm feeling lost, I turn to the Harry Potter series for guidance. I grew up reading these books, and I have turned to them for comfort for almost my entire life. To me, these books are an excellent example of why children's books need to show the darker parts of the world. How J.K. Rowling's characters cope with loss, death, and evil has profoundly influenced the way that I cope with those things in my own life.

Unfortunately, every person has to experience loss at some point in their life. There will be times when you'll identify with Angry Harry — you know, the boy who threw Dumbledore's possessions around his office because he can't bear to accept that Sirius has died. There will be times when you'll feel like Desperate Harry — the boy who sat for hours in front of the mirror of Erised, wishing desperately for a life in which his parents were still with him. There will be times when you'll feel like Nostalgic Harry — the boy who pored over old photo albums and notes from his loved ones.

These quotes from Harry Potter about loss may just help get you through all of those moments:

"Things we lose have a way of coming back to us in the end, if not always in the way we expect."

― Luna Lovegood, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

"You think the dead we loved truly ever leave us? You think that we don't recall them more clearly in times of great trouble?"

― Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

"Numbing the pain for a while will make it worse when you finally feel it."

― Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

"Understanding is the first step to acceptance, and only with acceptance can there be recovery."

― Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

"To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure."

― Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

"You care so much you feel as though you will bleed to death with the pain of it."

― Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

"Love as powerful as your mother's for you leaves it's own mark. To have been loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us some protection forever."

― Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

"The fact that you can feel pain like this is your greatest strength."

― Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

"She had made her "g's" the same way he did: he searched the letter for every one of them, and each felt like a friendly little wave glimpsed from behind a veil. The letter was an incredible treasure, proof that Lily Potter had lived, really lived, that her warm hand had once moved across this parchment, tracing into these letters, words about him, Harry, her son."

― Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

"Somewhere out in the darkness, a phoenix was singing in a way Harry had never heard before: a stricken lament of terrible beauty. And Harry felt, as he had felt about phoenix song before, that the music was inside him, not without: It was his own grief turned magically to song."

― Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

"It seemed impossible that there could be people in the world who still desired food, who laughed, who neither knew nor cared that Sirius Black was gone forever."

― Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix