“I'd been at the mercy of a prick on a power trip, the kind of buttoned-up bantam rooster who gets off on control and then, when you resist him, tells you that you've got issues with control.”

“You want to be happy? You want to be well? Then put your boots on.”

“This will sound strange, and yet I'm sure it was the point: it was a bit like being high. That, for me, anyway, had always been the attraction of drugs, to stop the brutal round of hypercritical th...”

“That was the crux. You. Only you could work on you. Nobody could force you, and if you weren't ready, then you weren't ready, and no amount of open-armed encouragement was going to change that.”

“If I was lonely, if I was afraid of being alone, then why abandon myself? Why run to someone else looking to give myself the thing that only I could give? I wanted to escape myself because I felt e...”

“I was always asking myself why. Why am I feeling this? Thinking that if I knew the cause I could find the cure. But of course there was no reasonable why, at least not in the present. I was awash i...”

“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.”