Not necessarily; someone who’s as deeply misanthropic as Quirrell might wish most people dead (having killed before, he can, as per Moody’s explanation, wish people dead rather more casually than non-murderers.) If you’re already capable of bringing intent-to-kill to bear on pretty much anyone who crosses you, you can probably use it strategically the way Quirrell suggests.
On the other hand, even if Quirrell’s explanation holds true, it does suggest Harry should revise upwards his estimates of just how cavalier Quirrell is with other people’s lives.
just how cavalier Quirrell is with other people’s lives.
Surely Harry already understands that Quirrel places no intrinsic value on other people’s lives. Perhaps this understanding is not visceral enough yet, though.
It should already be pretty high though—Harry even points it out at the time (Rule 1 of Unforgivable Curse Safety) and Quirrell equivocates it away by mixing up etiquette rules with safety rules. That might just as easily have ended with “I just shot Bahry in the face” considering how fast the spell must be going—probably <100 ms to recognize he can’t dodge in time, and push him away.
The Auror starts dodging as soon as he recognizes the Killing Curse. This probably gives Quirrell a reasonable window of time to judge whether or not his opponent will dodge in time.
How large this window is, that’s another question. Voldemort can say the incantation in “less than half a second” but the description of that doesn’t match the description of the Azkaban scene, so it seems that Quirrell says the curse more slowly. This suggests that either he is telling the truth when he says that he wanted Bahry to dodge, or else Voldemort’s skill at tongue-twisters is rare even among capable battle wizards, and he doesn’t want Harry to make the connection.
Not necessarily; someone who’s as deeply misanthropic as Quirrell might wish most people dead (having killed before, he can, as per Moody’s explanation, wish people dead rather more casually than non-murderers.) If you’re already capable of bringing intent-to-kill to bear on pretty much anyone who crosses you, you can probably use it strategically the way Quirrell suggests.
On the other hand, even if Quirrell’s explanation holds true, it does suggest Harry should revise upwards his estimates of just how cavalier Quirrell is with other people’s lives.
Surely Harry already understands that Quirrel places no intrinsic value on other people’s lives. Perhaps this understanding is not visceral enough yet, though.
It should already be pretty high though—Harry even points it out at the time (Rule 1 of Unforgivable Curse Safety) and Quirrell equivocates it away by mixing up etiquette rules with safety rules. That might just as easily have ended with “I just shot Bahry in the face” considering how fast the spell must be going—probably <100 ms to recognize he can’t dodge in time, and push him away.
The Auror starts dodging as soon as he recognizes the Killing Curse. This probably gives Quirrell a reasonable window of time to judge whether or not his opponent will dodge in time.
How large this window is, that’s another question. Voldemort can say the incantation in “less than half a second” but the description of that doesn’t match the description of the Azkaban scene, so it seems that Quirrell says the curse more slowly. This suggests that either he is telling the truth when he says that he wanted Bahry to dodge, or else Voldemort’s skill at tongue-twisters is rare even among capable battle wizards, and he doesn’t want Harry to make the connection.