J.K. Rowling

No, Harry, you listen," said Hermione. "We're coming with you. That was decided months ago - years, really.

Course Dumbledore trusts you,_ growled Moody. __e__ a trusting man, isn__ he? Believes in second chances. But me _ I say there are spots that don__ come off, Snape. Spots that never come off, d__ou know what I mean?

The last words Albus Dumbledore spoke to the pair of us?' Harry is the best hope we have. Trust him.

Somewhere out in the darkness, a phoenix was singing in a way Harry had never heard before: a stricken lament of terrible beauty.

Harry flung himself out from behind the bush and pulled out his wand."EXPECTO PATRONUM!" he yelled.And out of the end of his wand burst, not a shapeless cloud of mist, but a blinding, dazzling, silver animal. He screwed up his eyes, trying to see what it was. It looked like a horse. It was galloping silently away from him, across the black surface of the lake. He saw it lower its head and charge at the swarming dementors. . . . Now it was galloping around and around the black shapes on the ground, and the dementors were falling back, scattering, retreating into the darkness. . . . They were gone. The Patronus turned. It was cantering back toward Harry across the still surface of the water. It wasn't a horse. It wasn't a unicorn, either. It was a stag. It was shining brightly as the moon above. . . it was coming back to him.

We've all got both light and dark inside us. What matters is the part we choose to act on. That's who we really are.

The most important thing is to read as much as you can, like I did. It will give you an understanding of what makes good writing and it will enlarge your vocabulary.

You can't live without failing at something, unless you love so cautiously you might as well have nit lived at all, in which case, you fail be default.

Depression isn't just being a bit sad. It's feeling nothing. It's not wanting to be alive anymore.

Things we lose have a way of coming back to us in the end, if not always in the way we expect.

As much money and life as you could want! The two things most human beings would choose above all - the trouble is, humans do have a knack of choosing precisely those things that are worst for them.

It__ so difficult to describe depression to someone who__ never been there, because it__ not sadness. I know sadness. Sadness is to cry and to feel. But it__ that cold absence of feeling_ that really hollowed-out feeling.

Depression is the most unpleasant thing I have ever experienced. . . . It is that absence of being able to envisage that you will ever be cheerful again. The absence of hope. That very deadened feeling, which is so very different from feeling sad. Sad hurts but it's a healthy feeling. It is a necessary thing to feel. Depression is very different.

My mother can't have been magic, or she wouldn't have died", said Riddle

Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility, or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can't remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, the law, or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.You see? If all you remember in years to come is the 'gay wizard' joke, I've come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step to self-improvement.

Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations.

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.