Shut your mouth! You dare speak his name with your unworthy lips, you dare besmirch it with your half-blood's tongue, you dare —

There. Maybe if you're lucky, you'll get a scar! That's what you want, isn't it?

Deliberately causing mayhem in Snape's Potions class was about as safe as poking a sleeping dragon in the eye.

Ah well... wand still in your jeans? Both buttocks still on? Okay, let’s go.

I pay a lot of tax, and I feel, one of the reasons I stay and pay why I'm not based in Monaco... I think my country helped me.

But some part of him realized, even as he fought to break free from Lupin, that Sirius had never kept him waiting before. . . . Sirius had risked everything, always, to see Harry, to help him. . . . If Sirius was not reappearing out of that archway when Harry was yelling for him as though his life depended on it, the only possible explanation was that he could not come back. . . . That he really was . . .

October extinguished itself in a rush of howling winds and driving rain and November arrived, cold as frozen iron, with hard frosts every morning and icy drafts that bit at exposed hands and faces.