June 2011
71 posts
“So long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemnation, which, in the face of civilization, artificially creates hells on earth, and complicates a destiny that is divine, with human fatality; so long as the three problems of the age—the degradation of man by poverty, and the ruin of woman by starvation, and the dwarfing of childhood by physical and spiritual night—are not solved; so long as, in certain religions, social asphyxia shall be possible; in other words, and from a yet more extended point of view, so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, books like this cannot be useless.”
—Victor Hugo, Les Misérables Preface
“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (via girlwithoutwings)
“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”
—Oscar Wilde (via theprincessleah)
Natalie McDonald, who appears on page 159 of Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire, was a real person. She was a nine-year-old girl from Toronto, Canada, who was dying of leukaemia. She wrote to JK Rowling asking what was going to happen in the next Harry Potter book as she would not live long enough to read it. The kindly author emailed back, but Natalie had died a day earlier. In tribute, she became a first-year student at Hogwarts named by the Sorting Hat in Gryffindor - the house for the brave at heart - in the fourth book.
