I love you, Hermione,” said Ron.

There's a time and a place for getting a smart mouth.

I think that perhaps if I had had to slow down the ideas so that I could capture them on paper I might have stifled some of them.

Do not pity the dead, Harry. Pity the living, and, above all those who live without love.

Excuse me, are you the imprint of a departed soul?

Look...at...me..." he whispered. The green eyes found the black, but after a second, something in the depths of the dark pair seemed to vanish, leaving them fixed, blank, and empty. The hand holding Harry thudded to the floor, and Snape moved no more.

Harry's status as orphan gives him a freedom other children can only dream about (guiltily, of course). No child wants to lose their parents, yet the idea of being removed from the expectations of parents is alluring. The orphan in literature is freed from the obligation to satisfy his/her parents, and from the inevitable realization that his/her parents are flawed human beings. There is something liberating, too, about being transported into the kind of surrogate family which boarding school represents, where the relationships are less intense and the boundaries perhaps more clearly defined.