She navigated away from the Parish Council message board and dropped into her favorite medical website, where she painstakingly entered the words "brain" and "death" in the search box. The suggestions were endless. Shirley scrolled through the possibilities, her mild eyes rolling up and down, wondering to which of these deadly conditions, some of them unpronounceable, she owed her present happiness.

Everyone queue up!' Malfoy roared to the crowd. 'Harry Potter's giving out signed photos!

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.

Failure is so impor - it doesn't get spoken about enough. We speak about success all the time.

Birth and death: there was the same consciousness of heightened existence and of her own elevated importance

You see what you expect to see, Severus.

... there are far, far worse things in the living world than dying.