“Raven had been shunned and abandoned throughout his life. Friends often came and went without a word or worse, they toyed with his emotions and shared his secrets with those he chose to distrust. His loneliness was inevitable and his secrets were damaging enough. Through all of his largely brief but emotionally involved friendships and infatuations, the depression and the darkness of his past, there had been one place to which he could go for solitude—either in thought or in person—and he never shared the knowledge of its existence or its secrets with anyone. That place dwelled within him even all of these years since the summer when he was nine and all that could ever have gone wrong, did.”

“His ministrations were tender, his eyes hooded as he seemed to withhold certain emotions from her. She allowed him his secrets, and took what he gave with a greed that shocked her with its intensity. But he never had to know. He never had to glimpse how deeply she felt for him, or discover the secret she had always suspected and finally admitted to herself.She loved him.Completely. Every part of him, good and bad, her friend and lover and partner and rival. She wanted to spend the rest of her life with him, giving him everything, even though she knew he didn’t want her. She crammed the knowledge to a secret place in- side. Then realized she’d take whatever he gave, even though it would never be enough.”

“It was one of the secret opinions, such as we all have, of Peter Brench, that his main success in life would have consisted in his never having committed himself about the work, as it was called, of his friend Morgan Mallow. This was a subject on which it was, to the best of his belief, impossible with veracity to quote him, and it was nowhere on record that he had, in the connexion, on any occasion and in any embarrassment, either lied or spoken the truth. Such a triumph had its honour even for a man of other triumphs--a man who had reached fifty, who had escaped marriage, who had lived within his means, who had been in love with Mrs Mallow for years without breathing it, and who, last but not least, had judged himself once for all.”

“But on the minus side, Zeus had also had his share of fiascos. He swallowed Metis, the Goddess of Wisdom & Prudence, & thus was responsible for the disappearance of both wisdom & prudence in Olympus. And he could not keep his hands off all those lovely Titanesses, Giantesses, Nymphs & Mortal women whom he loved or secretly loved. He took them to wife, even when they were unwilling, such as Metis, Leto, Asteria & Nemesis. And he raped them, even when they were not aware that they were being raped, such as Alcmene, Danae, Io & Europa. And these were only a few of his many love affairs that Hera knew. What he had managed to keep secret from Hera was his greatest love affair of all- his affair with the Goddess of Love, which had already resulted in the mis-begetting of the monstrous love-child, Priapus.”

“His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was”

“He was about to go home, about to return to the place where he had had a family. It was in Godric’s Hollow that, but for Voldemort, he would have grown up and spent every school holiday. He could have invited friends to his house. . . . He might even have had brothers and sisters. . . . It would have been his mother who had made his seventeenth birthday cake. The life he had lost had hardly ever seemed so real to him as at this moment, when he knew he was about to see the place where it had been taken from him.”