“Harry picked it up and stared at it, his heart twanging like a giant elastic band. No one, ever, in his whole life, had written to him. Who would? He had no friends, no other relatives — he didn’t belong to the library, so he’d never even got rude notes asking for books back. Yet here it was, a letter, addressed so plainly there could be no mistake:Mr. H. PotterThe Cupboard under the Stairs4 Privet DriveLittle WhingingSurrey”

“He skidded to a dead halt and stared hard at Austin. The boy’s chin carried so many nicks from his first shave that it was a wonder he hadn’t bled to death. He was a year older than Houston had been when he’d last stood on a battlefield. Sweet Lord, Houston had never had the opportunity to shave his whole face; he’d never flirted with girls, wooed women, or danced through the night. He’d never loved. Not until Amelia. And he’d given her up because he’d thought it was best for her. Because he had nothing to offer her but a one-roomed log cabin, a few horses, a dream so small that it wouldn’t cover the palm of her hand. And his heart. His wounded heart.”

“And so he did the hardest thing he’d ever done in his life: he picked up his hat and walked away.”

“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.”

“Our library isn't very extensive," said Anne, "but every book in it is a friend. We've picked our books up through the years, here and there, never buying one until we had first read it and knew that it belonged to the race of Joseph.”

“And as the music ended, he saw her, like a woman in a romance, pull from her cotton sleeve a note that she pushed into his breast pocket. It would burn there unread for another hour as he danced and talked with in-laws who did not matter to him, who got in the way, whose bloodline connection to him or his wife he could not care less about. Everything that was important to him existed suddenly in the potency of Marie-Neige. He could tell what the shallow freize of the wedding party that surrounded them would continue to be, and yet the one he knew best-he could not conceive how she would behave or respond to him in a week, or even in an hour. She had stepped into more than his arms for a dance, had waited for the precise seconds so it was possible and socially forgivable-the sunlit wedding procession, the eternal meal-and she had passed him a billet-doux as if they were within a Dumas. The note she had written said 'Good-bye.' Then it said 'Hello.' And then it reminded him that 'A message sent by pigeon to The Hague can sometimes change everything.' She had, like one of those partially villainous and always evolving heroines, turned his heart over on the wrong day.”