John Granger > Quotes

“Second, the reason to embrace and celebrate these novels as the countercultural event that they are is due largely to the subliminal messages delivered by Harry and friends in their stolen wheelbarrows. Readers walk away, maybe a little softer on the occult than they were, but with story-embedded messages: the importance of a pure soul; love's power even over death; about sacrifice and loyalty; a host of images and shadows about Christ and how essential 'right belief' is for personal transformation and victory over internal and external evils.”
― John Granger, The Deathly Hallows Lectures: The Hogwarts Professor Explains the Final Harry Potter Adventure

“This is the power of myth: that we can experience invisible spiritual realities and truths greater than visible, material things in story form.”
― John Granger, Looking for God in Harry Potter

“When God is driven to the periphery of the public square, the human spiritual capacity longs for exercise, and it often finds it in the “suspension of disbelief” and activity of the imagination that are available in novels and movies.”
― John Granger

“Another commandment, really an application of the commandment to love, is the prohibition against judging our brother’s sins (Matthew 7:1-5). This is not a prohibition of discernment and virtuous discrimination, but the warning against identifying our neighbor by his sins and the pretense of being without sin ourselves.”
― John Granger, How Harry Cast His Spell: The Meaning behind the Mania for J. K. Rowling's Bestselling Books

“Ms. Rowling has said she read Austen’s Emma “at least twenty times” and that she “rereads Austen’s novels in rotation.”
― John Granger, Harry Potter's Bookshelf: The Great Books behind the Hogwarts Adventures

“People I call ‘Serious Readers,’ like Lewis’ ‘literary man and woman,’ not only re-read books they love but want to know ore about their favorites and why they love them. Beyond reading what they can about the author, serious readers read reviews and published reflections of other serious readers.”
― John Granger, Unlocking Harry Potter: Five Keys for the Serious Reader

“We act as if we know what’s really going on when we haven’t a clue about what any of the players in our lives are doing and thinking. Just like Harry.

Reading Harry Potter is a delightful introduction to the importance of striving to understand how little we are seeing through our eyeballs and how much our prejudices cloud even what we think we are seeing. Can’t get much more important than that. The Greeks called it, “Gnothi Seauton,” Know Thyself.”
― John Granger, Unlocking Harry Potter: Five Keys for the Serious Reader

“The first five Harry Potter novels end in almost identical fashion. Before the trip to King’s Cross Station on the Hogwarts Express, Harry does battle underground with an agent of the Dark Lord Voldemort himself, dies a figurative death, is saved by a symbol of Christ, and learns from Albus Dumbledore what really happened in that year’s adventure.”
― John Granger, Harry Potter's Bookshelf: The Great Books behind the Hogwarts Adventures

“Yeats is supposed to have said that education is lighting a fire not filling a bucket; the model and thesis of Bookshelf are kindling for the fire rather than just more information for your cranial data files.”
― John Granger, Harry Potter's Bookshelf: The Great Books behind the Hogwarts Adventures

“Once we understand symbols we can better understand what it means to be human; we are creatures made in the image of God …we are indeed three dimensional beings in time and space of the Trinity.”
― John Granger, How Harry Cast His Spell: The Meaning behind the Mania for J. K. Rowling's Bestselling Books

“Earth and fairy-land coexist upon the same foot of ground. It was all a matter of the seeing eye . . . The dweller in this world can become aware of an existence on a totally different plane. To go from Earth to faery is like passing from this time to eternity; it is not a journey in space, but a change in mental outlook.”
― John Granger, Harry Potter's Bookshelf: The Great Books behind the Hogwarts Adventures

“Traditional school stories feature the hero (or heroine) and his (or her) best friend. A third companion commonly joins them, corresponding to the “rule of three“ policy that historically operated in many boarding schools.”
― John Granger, Harry Potter's Bookshelf: The Great Books behind the Hogwarts Adventures

“In my experience, all the good literature professors, the ones that are able to get you to see the genius and magic of a book, begin the same way. They provide an overview of the historical beliefs, prejudices, and concerns of the era when the book was written and how the specific writer conformed, or did not conform with these beliefs -- especially important when studying books, plays, or poems written a long time ago.”
― John Granger, Unlocking Harry Potter: Five Keys for the Serious Reader

“We act as if we know what’s really going on when we haven’t a clue about what any of the players in our lives are doing and thinking. Just like Harry.

Reading Harry Potter is a delightful introduction to the importance of striving to understand how little we are seeing through our eyeballs and how much our prejudices cloud even what we think we are seeing. Can’t get much more important than that. The Greeks called it, ‘Gnothi Seauton,’ Know Thyself.”
― John Granger, Unlocking Harry Potter: Five Keys for the Serious Reader by John Granger

“The third person limited omniscient view is not just another way of telling a story; it is the view we too-human readers have of the world, as unconscious as we are of our own pride and prejudices.”
― John Granger, Harry Potter's Bookshelf: The Great Books behind the Hogwarts Adventures

“choosing to tell the story in the “third person limited omniscient” view—sitting on a character’s shoulder and sharing his or her perspective—fosters sympathy. Another way to grab the reader by the heart is to trigger the trip wire tied to the reader’s sense of fairness or justice. This is the “gotcha” of mystery writing, truth be told. When presented with a crime and a messy set of clues, not to mention the stray corpse or two, our conscience flashes a red light, especially if there is someone unjustly accused or a murderer escaping without punishment. I don’t know if we are hardwired this way (I suspect we are) or if this is a conditioned response from childhood training. Whatever the cause, it’s a rare reader who doesn’t want to have the pieces to the puzzle assembled and justice served for the innocent and the guilty. Who won’t read to the very end to learn the solution and hear the confession of the bad guy? Take this one step further and you have Rocky (the boxer, not the squirrel).”
― John Granger, Harry Potter's Bookshelf: The Great Books behind the Hogwarts Adventures

“The fundamental and most practical point of influence between Rowling and Austen is the perspective in which the Harry Potter novels are told and how this perspective lulls the passive reader into traveling down the erring path (and far away from the solution of the mystery).”
― John Granger, Harry Potter's Bookshelf: The Great Books behind the Hogwarts Adventures

“Drive is what gets us hooked and keeps those pages turning. The insoluble mystery that awakens our desire for revelation and resolution as well as our sense of injustice, combined with the ease and surety that an orphan novel uses to win our identification with and interest in a sympathetic character, is a story that acts as a conveyor belt in overdrive.”
― John Granger, Harry Potter's Bookshelf: The Great Books behind the Hogwarts Adventures

“insoluble problem is set, the narrator presents the clues, the detective resolves the mystery, the criminal is confronted in a dramatic denouement, and the moral order returns to one degree or another.4 The essential part of this formula with respect to its ability to keep us turning pages, however, doesn’t involve the players or the murder. It is our confusion. We are engaged first and foremost by the mystery involved,”
― John Granger, Harry Potter's Bookshelf: The Great Books behind the Hogwarts Adventures

“A crime is committed. An investigator seeks out the truth. The truth is revealed.”
― John Granger, Harry Potter's Bookshelf: The Great Books behind the Hogwarts Adventures

“We are created as images of God, but, in order to become His likeness, we must die to the old fallen man in us, and choose rightly the means to our perfection.”
― John Granger, Unlocking Harry Potter: Five Keys for the Serious Reader

“it does hold to the narrative drive elements of a good mystery well told. Those elements are reader mystification, the detection of cause, and restoration of order.3”
― John Granger, Harry Potter's Bookshelf: The Great Books behind the Hogwarts Adventures

“The model I’ve chosen is what Northrop Frye called the iconological school of literary criticism. In a nutshell, we’ll be looking at Harry Potter as a text like all great art with four layers of meaning: the surface, the moral, the allegorical, and the anagogical or spiritual.”
― John Granger, Harry Potter's Bookshelf: The Great Books behind the Hogwarts Adventures

“Frequently found among the hero’s friends in classic school stories is a pair of identical twins, often practical jokers whose activities provide both comic relief and confusion that gets sorted out at the end.”
― John Granger, Harry Potter's Bookshelf: The Great Books behind the Hogwarts Adventures

“Her books are a gathering together of schoolboy stories, hero’s journey epics, alchemical drama, manners-and-morals fiction, satire, gothic romance, detective mysteries, adventure tales, coming-of-age novels, and Christian fantasy.”
― John Granger, Harry Potter's Bookshelf: The Great Books behind the Hogwarts Adventures

“We think we’re seeing everything because Emma isn’t telling us the story, but what we’re not seeing—namely, what is happening outside of Emma’s view or of her understanding—is, alas, where the real story is happening.”
― John Granger, Harry Potter's Bookshelf: The Great Books behind the Hogwarts Adventures

“By reflecting on Ms. Rowling’s choices and her artistry, you may gain a new perspective on reading and art in general that opens other books and films and poems and plays.”
― John Granger, Unlocking Harry Potter: Five Keys for the Serious Reader

“They won’t care how much you know ’til they know how much you care.” It’s true in the classroom and on the playing field with high-school age students, certainly, but it also is something of a guideline for writers. Until the reader cares about the characters”
― John Granger, Harry Potter's Bookshelf: The Great Books behind the Hogwarts Adventures