A good book should leave you slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.

Every early morning, all they had to do was open the door with the knob purple-down and go out into the swimming green haze to gather flowers. It soon became a routine. Sophie took her stick and her scissors and stumped about, chatting to her stick, using it to test the squashy ground or hook down sprays of high-up choice roses. Michael took an invention of his own which he was very proud of. It was a large tin tub with water in it, which floated in the air and followed Michael wherever he went among the bushes. The dog-man went too. He had a wonderful time rushing about the wet green lanes, chasing butterflies or trying to catch the tiny, bright birds that fed on the flowers. While he dashed about, Sophie cut armloads of branches of blue hibiscus, and Michael loaded the bath with orchids, roses, starry white flowers, shiny vermilion ones, or anything that caught his fancy. They all enjoyed this time.

Being born a woman is an awful tragedy… Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, bar room regulars - to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording - all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yet, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night…

If you try anything, if you try to lose weight, or to improve yourself, or to love, or to make the world a better place, you have already achieved something wonderful, before you even begin. Forget failure. If things don’t work out the way you want, hold your head up high and be proud. And try again. And again. And again!

Well, young lady, have you been good to your mother? / The question is, has she been good to me?

Huddled under the cloak, it smells of boy and armpit and incipient adulthood, which also smells of boy and armpit, and Sirius’s socks and Peter’s dinner and the weird goo James puts in his hair. Remus doesn’t mind if their song is sung to the rafters or if only they know it in the end. They shuffle out into the warm night together, and Remus thinks if they could just keep it all as some secret amongst four good friends they’ll be just fine until they’re impossibly old and the seven years they spent at Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry has shrunk into a short sweet memory, distant as a good dream.