“A voice that had traversed the centuries, so heavy it broke what it touched, so heavy I feared it would ring in me with eternal resonance, a voice rusty with the sound of curses and the hoarse cries that issue from the delta in the last paroxysm of orgasm.”

“I did never know so full a voice issue from so empty a heart: but the saying is true 'The empty vessel makes the greatest sound'.”

“Why, June, you sound surprised.” He’d put on an offended-housewife voice, but it was in a hoarse whisper, so it sounded like an offended housewife who smoked five packs of cigarettes a day. I laughed.”

“The faintness of the voice was pitiable and dreadful. It was not the faintness of physical weakness, though confinement and hard fare no doubt had their part in it. Its deplorable peculiarity was, that it was the faintness of solitude and disuse. It was like the last feeble echo of a sound made long long ago. So entirely had it lost the life and resonance of the human voice, that if affected the senses like a once beautiful colour faded away into a poor weak stain. So sunken and suppressed it was, that it was like a voice underground. So expressive it was, of a hopeless and lost creature, that a famished traveller, wearied out by lonely wandering in a wilderness, would remember home and friends in such a tone before lying down to die.”

“Would you like me to [kill you] now?" asked Snape, his voice heavy with irony. "Or would you like a few moments to compose an epitaph?”

“I cried a river of tears but he was too heavy to float on them. So I dragged him with me these years across an ocean.”