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“Then you should,” said Dumbledore. He drew a deep breath.

“You know the secret of my sister’s ill health, what those Muggles did, what she became. You know how my poor father sought revenge, and paid the price, died in Azkaban. You know how my mother gave up her own life to care for Ariana. I resented it, Harry.”

Dumbledore stated it baldly, coldly. He was looking now over the top of Harry’s head, into the distance.

“I was gifted, I was brilliant. I wanted to escape. I wanted to shine. I wanted glory."

“Do not misunderstand me,” he said, and pain crossed the face so that he looked ancient again. “I loved them. I loved my parents, I loved my brother and my sister, but I was selfish, Harry, more selfish than you, who are a remarkably selfless person, could possibly imagine.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter Series Box Set

“The wish to please, to charm—the desire to provoke desire—runs deep in me and seems to have been there from the beginning.”
― Sigrid Nunez, A Feather on the Breath of God

“The sound of a pen scratching in the night is a holy sound.”
― Sigrid Nunez, A Feather on the Breath of God

“There is indeed a peculiar charm, both in friendship and in Eros, about those moments when Appreciative love lies, as it were, curled up asleep, and the mere ease and ordinariness of the relationship (free as solitude, yet neither is alone) wraps us round. No need to talk. No need to make love. No needs at all except perhaps to stir the fire.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves