Snape looked horrified. 'You have kept him alive so that he can die at the right moment?''Don't look shocked, Severus. How many men and women have you watched die?''Lately, only those whom I could not save', said Snape.

Never stand in the way of letting God use people__ actions, in order to solve a greater issue in the world.

It seems to me that evil is a kind of ultimate greed, a greed that is so all-encompassing that it can't ever see anything lovely, rare, or precious without wanting to possess it. A greed so total that if it can't possess these things, it will destroy them rather than chance that someone else might have them. And a greed so intense that even having these things never causes it to lessen one iota -- the lovely, the rare and the precious never affect it except to make it want them.

His three boats stove around him, and oars and men both whirling in the eddies; one captain, seizing the line-knife from his broken prow, had dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duellist at his foe, blindly seeking with a six inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale. That captain was Ahab. And then it was, that suddenly sweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw benieath him, Moby Dick had reaped away Ahab's leg.

Searching for a lost city is a particularly European obsession.

Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.