“Her husband, Rafael, who'd left her and who'd contributed not one penny to his children's welfare, was a fool of such dimensions that he should have been required to dress like a jester, complete with silly hat and curled-toe shoes.”

“Her golden hair moved like a hundred moths, all trying to saturate themselves in sunlight, while his hair was spiked like cleats, and he wore a shoe for a hat. He said it helped him to headstands while looking up her dress.”

“She didn't want to think about how wrong this was or how foolish it was to give herself to a known seducer. Because tonight Oliver wasn't that man. Not to her. He was the boy who'd cried over his dead mother, the young man who'd lost himself in drink and women to forget the past, the marquess who'd vowed not to marry for money. He was the man to be her lover.”

“Was it—was she making a real prediction?'Dumbledore looked mildly impressed.'Do you know, Harry, I think she might have been,' he said thoughtfully. 'Who'd have thought it? That brings her total of real predictions up to two. I should offer her a pay raise...”

“But I must start at the beginning, if I can find it. Beginnings are elusive things. Just when you think you have hold of one, you look back and see another, earlier beginning, and an earlier one before that. Even if you start with "Chapter One: I am Born," you still have the problem of antecedents, of cause and effect. Why is young David fatherless? Because, Dickens tells us, his father died of a delicate constitution. Yes, but where did this mortal delicacy come from? Dickens doesn't say, so we're left to speculate. A congenital defect, perhaps, inherited from his mother, whose own mother had married beneath her to spite her cruel father, who'd been beaten as a child by a nursemaid who was forced into service when her faithless husband abandoned her for a woman he chanced to meet when his carriage wheel broke in front of the milliner's where she'd gone to have her hat trimmed. If we begin there, young David is fatherless because his great-great-grandfather's nursemaid's husband's future mistress's hat needed adornment.”

“His wife...always dressed in mourning for the children who died in infancy and squeezed breathless by the pressure of her corset, her religion, and the husband fate had dealt her”