Seventeen, eh!" said Hagrid as he accepted a bucket-sized glass of wine from Fred. "Six years to the day we met, Harry, d’yeh remember it?" "Vaguely," said Harry, grinning up at him. "Didn’t you smash down the front door, give Dudley a pig’s tail, and tell me I was a wizard?" "I forge’ the details," Hagrid chortled.

The only reason to delay at this point was because the immediate prospect was so deeply uninviting.

Everybody finished the song at different times. At last, only the Weasley twins were left singing along to a very slow funeral march.

The castle grounds were gleaming in the sunlight as though freshly painted; the cloudless sky smiled at itself in the smoothly sparkling lake, the satin-green lawns rippled occasionally in a gentle breeze: June had arrived.

Snape was looking as though the first person to ask him for a Love Potion would be force-fed poison.

The spells are made up. I have met people who assure me, very seriously, that they are trying to do them, and I can assure them, just as seriously, that they don’t work.

It sort of floated toward me,” said Ron, illustrating the movement with his free index finger, “right to my chest, and then — it just went straight through. It was here,” he touched a point close to his heart, “I could feel it, it was hot. And once it was inside me I knew what I was supposed to do, I knew it would take me where I needed to go. So I Disapparated and came out on the side of a hill. There was snow everywhere. . . .