“It can be good to be given what you want; it can be better, in the end, never to have it proved to you that this is what you wanted”

“You mustn't get so upset about what you feel, Spud. No one's a hundred per cent consistent all the time. We might like to be. We can plan our lives along certain lines. But you know, there's no fut...”

“It's only since it's been made impossible that it's been made so damn easy. It's got like prohibition, with bums and crooks making fortunes out of hooch, everyone who might have had a palate losing...”

“After some years of muddled thinking on the subject, he suddenly saw quite clearly what it was he had been running away from; why he had refused Sandy's first invitation, and what the trouble had b...”

“The truth." Dumbledore sighed. "It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and should therefore be treated with great caution.”

“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”

“Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it.”

“The big lesson of planetary science is when you do a first reconnaissance of a new kind of object, you should expect the unexpected.”

“Which death is preferably to every other? 'The unexpected'.”

“The one thing we can all be sure about in politics is you are as well to expect the unexpected.”