Those final weeks, spanning end of summer and the beginning of another autumn, are blurred in memory, perhaps because our understanding of each other had reached that sweet depth where two people communicate more often in silence than in words: an affectionate quietness replaces the tensions, the unrelaxed chatter and chasing about that produce a friendship’s more showy, more, in the surface sense, dramatic moments.

Friendship is so weird. You just pick a human you've met and you're like, 'Yep, I like this one,' and you just do stuff with them.

My best friend is me, and I take good care of me.

In the face of adversity, hope often comes in the form of a friend who reaches out to us.

But some part of him realized, even as he fought to break free from Lupin, that Sirius had never kept him waiting before. . . . Sirius had risked everything, always, to see Harry, to help him. . . . If Sirius was not reappearing out of that archway when Harry was yelling for him as though his life depended on it, the only possible explanation was that he could not come back. . . . That he really was . . .

Friendship is the only thing in the world concerning the usefulness of which all mankind are agreed.