Poverty entails fear and stress and sometimes depression. It means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships.

Wherever Harry went inside the tiny cottage or its garden, he could hear the constant ebb and flow of the sea, like the breathing of some great, slumbering creature.

Where is Wood?" said Harry, suddenly realizing he wasn't there. "Still in the showers," said Fred. "We think he's trying to drown himself.

Don't count your owls before they are delivered.

I think it's alarming that people believe that success enables one to forget how life felt before. As if one could simply exchange one's values.

Never try to understand the students. They hate it. They would much rather be tragically misunderstood, wallow in self-pity, stew in their own —” “That’s enough, Phineas,” said Dumbledore.

Why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.