“He sobbed in desperation at the burden of fear he carried with him every day of his life.”

“Andrew indulged in a little fantasy in which his father dropped dead, gunned down by an invisible sniper. Andrew visualised himself patting his sobbing mother on the back while he telephoned the undertaker. He had a cigarette in his mouth as he ordered the cheapest coffin.”

“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.”

“Every time he tried to reconstruct the internal arguments that had led to his decision, they sounded feebler to him.”

“As a sobbing Wood passed Harry the Cup, as he lifted it into the air, Harry felt he could have produced the world's best Patronus.”

“Then he heard a terrible cry that pulled at his insides, that expressed agony of a kind that neither flame nor curse could cause, and he stood up, swaying, more frightened than he had been that day, more frightened, perhaps, than he had been in his whole life...”

“He could not even take comfort in knowing that he had spent most of his adult life in dread of calamities had not materialized, because, by the law of averages, one of them was bound to come true one day.”