2007, Steve [?], “build your financial horcrux”, in brip blap[1], retrieved 2007-12-03:
In J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books a Horcrux is described as a “receptacle in which a Dark wizard has hidden a part of his soul for the purposes of attaining immortality.” With part of a wizard’s soul stored away like this, as long as the Horcrux is intact the wizard will remain alive, and therefore is immortal. Even if the wizard’s body is “killed”, part of his soul will remain preserved inside the Horcrux. In other words, an evil wizard squirrels away bits of his soul in various trinkets so he can’t be killed totally. Nice trick. Here is my personal finance Horcrux: keep your “financial soul” hidden away in several Horcruxes, so that you can never be completely “killed.” A good example of this was the recent collapse of NetBank. Individuals (and companies) who kept their money in NetBank had their deposits insured up to a limit of $100,000 by the FDIC. While I doubt many people kept more than $100,000 in NetBank, I am sure there were a few. By keeping too much of their monetary “soul” in one Horcrux, they are exposed unnecessarily to risk.
2007 June 30, Lev Grossman, “My iPhone Review: The iPhone Isn't Actually a Horcrux”, in Techland[2], Time, retrieved 2007-12-03:
I tried and I tried to transfer a part of my soul into it. Just couldn't figure out where to stick the USB cable. May have to wait for Pogue's Missing Manual for that.
2007 October 4, Sarah Wilkes, “Real-life Horcrux”, in (Please provide the book title or journal name)[3], retrieved 2007-12-03:
I do 99.9% of my shopping at SuperTarget and Wild Oats, but I had to make sure MY diadem was a Horcrux, so nowhere but Wal-de-Mart’s crafty wedding aisle would do for such a purchase.
2011 November 1, Will Meyerhoffer, Way Worse Than Being a Dentist: The Lawyer's Quest for Meaning, Minneapolis: Mill City Press, →ISBN, →LCCN, →OL, page 91:
A partner at a law firm doesn't call the evil splinter of his shattered soul a horcrux. He calls it a Blackberry - the container of his arrogant narcissism.
2013, Adam Rawlins, The Strange Encounter of Sally Shakespeare and Toby Tinker, page 24:
They stared at it as if it was the one ring or the holy grail or a horcrux, or perhaps all of them rolled into one. An empty, plastic cat food bowl.
2013, Teddy Steinkellner, Trash Can Days: A Middle School Saga, page 20:
They were standard fit, vintage wash, pretty expensive, and I showed them to him and I said, “These are yours if you want them.” And do you know what he did? He actually flinched. Like these were haunted pants or something. Like these were Horcrux jeans with a piece of Lord Voldemort’s soul in them.
2014, Rachel Gibson, What I Love About You, page 151:
“How many Horcruxes have you created?” Blake asked as he put his card back in his wallet.
I point my fork toward Lindsey and Rachel. “Everybody with their faces buried in their screens. Are they looking for clues to find the horcrux? What’s so interesting?”
Again, he didn’t say anything and she asked him about the arrowhead—was it his Horcrux or something? was there a piece of his soul trapped inside it?—and he shrugged it off.
2016, Richard Kim, "It's Not Her Turn", in Who is Hillary Clinton?: Two Decades of Answers from the Left, pages 308-309:
And just how many horcruxes need to be destroyed before Larry Summers is forever vanquished from public life?
2017, Perdita Cargill, Waiting for Callback: Take Two, page 203:
I was quite glad when Moss put Poppy Leadley away (burying the magazine under a heavy pile of architecture books like it contained a Horcrux).
2017, Jacob D. Myers, Preaching Must Die!: Troubling Homiletical Theology, Fortress Press, →ISBN, pages 8–10:
Dogma functions as a horcrux for preaching when preachers feel the need to spend their twenty minutes (or forty-five minutes!) defending so-called truths about God against preaching’s “cultured despisers,” to borrow a phrase from Schleiermacher.[…]A second horcrux that homiletics has created is that of biblical exposition.[…]Timothy Keller, a popular expository preacher, argues that exposition “grounds the message in the text so that all the sermon’s points are points in the text, and it majors in the text’s major ideas.” Nope. That’s a horcrux. Ideas won’t save us. Scripture isn’t a foundation upon which we may ground anything. The Bible is quicksand.
2011, Chris Hardwick, The Nerdist Way: How to Reach the Next Level (in Real Life), page 88:
If you want the super-Nerdy analogy, imagine that each song is a Horcrux, which contains a tiny piece of your soul that you can scatter and map out in the world.
2016, Jennifer Bosworth, The Killing Jar, page 18:
“Oh. Um. Thanks.” I would rather have carried it myself. My guitar was like an extension of me, a Horcrux containing a piece of my soul.
2016, Cheryl B. Klein, The Magic Words: Writing Great Books for Children and Young Adults, page 338:
When I read manuscripts, I feel very aware that some part of the writer's soul lives in the pages—like a good Horcrux, say—and if I’m turning one down, I need to do so with thoughtfulness and respect.
And I loved the way they looked, all those journals lined up on a single bookshelf in my room, carving a path through time that you could follow, like a trail of bread crumbs, from that first day in Dr. Milton’s office right up to the present. It was as if I’d archived myself inside them—my own private horcruxes.
2017, E. Christopher Clark, Missing Mr. Wingfield, page 133:
Love is like a horcrux, isn’t it? You know what I’m talking about, right? 'Horcruxes are those awful left-behind bits of bad guy we found about in the latest Harry Potter. Love is like a horcrux, I say, only not as evil. You carve off a piece of yourself for every person you love and you leave it behind, just like Voldemort does when he kills someone. A souvenir that’s forever. That’s what love is. At least I think so.
I don't know how Yuka knew that this was the piece of me | loved the most, but somehow she did. (Or maybe it’s the only Horcrux | haven't successfully destroyed yet, like a fashion-world Harry Potter.)
These photos— / So many horcruxes / Containing the soul / Of us, / Our unforgivable sin, / The murder we committed / Together.
2020, Andrea Witcomb, Alexandra Bounia, “The restorative museum: Understanding the work of memory at the Museum of Refugee Memory in Skala Loutron, Lesvos, Greece”, in Sarah De Nardi, Hilary Orange, Steven High, Eerika Koskinen-Koivisto, editors, The Routledge Handbook of Memory and Place, Routledge:
[…]; they might not be important artefacts in terms of size, value, rarity or academic importance, but they are indeed keimelia, precious conveyors of individual and collective memory, while the Museum of Refugee Memory is a thalamos for them to be treasured, but also displayed for a sacred purpose – a purpose that has two sides to it. The first is to enable these objects to become horcruxes, magical objects used to house part of the Asia Minor refugees’ souls, thus giving them the home that they lost back.
2021, Curt Cloninger, Some Ways of Making Nothing: Apophatic Apparatuses in Contemporary Art, page 383:
Via nostalgia and sentimentality, objects act for humans as unwitting mnemonic horcruxes (my analogy, not Schwenger’s), storing parts of our memories inside themselves for our later involuntary retrieval.
