The idea that we could have a child who escapes from the confines of the adult world and goes somewhere where he has power, both literally and metaphorically, really appealed to me.

It was his own grief turned magically to song.

I'm going to keep going until I succeed — or die. Don't think I don't know how this might end. I've known it for years.

She had a way of seeing the beauty in others, even, and perhaps most especially, when that person couldn't see it in themselves.

Someone creeping into his yard in the dead of night? More likely there's a very shell-shocked cat wandering somewhere, covered in potato peelings.

Children being children, however, the grotesque Hopping Pot had taken hold of their imaginations. The solution was to jettison the pro-Muggle moral but keep the warty cauldron, so by the middle of the sixteenth century a different version of the tale was in wide circulation among wizarding families. In the revised story, the Hopping Pot protects an innocent wizard from his torch-bearing, pitchfork-toting neighbours by chasing them away from the wizard's cottage, catching them and swallowing them whole.

Like the fact that the person Sirius cared for the most about in the world was you," said Dumbledore quietly.