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61 " Snape and Dumbledore are equally clear that they fight for the rights of Muggle-borns, just as Snape and Dumbledore both sacrificed the chance to save their own lives because they used their last moments to protect Harry instead. "
― Lorrie Kim , Snape: A Definitive Reading
62 " This is something teachers can do with young students who have not even entered their teens. They are not yet old enough to resist the training they absorb from their environments. If they are conditioned at this age to use slurs and explode one another’s cauldrons, they will default to those behaviors later, and someone will get hurt. But if they are conditioned to disarm and to block unfriendly spells, those will become their defaults. "
63 " The sight of Harry choosing to die without defending himself made an impact on Voldemort, just as the sight of Snape taking his hands off his wound convinced Harry to pay attention to the message Snape delivered. Harry and Snape both had something they valued more than their own survival. "
64 " Snape is a different case. He is also a Master of Death, unafraid and accepting of death but barely interested in any of the Hallows at all. He is the anti-Voldemort. Whereas Voldemort is obsessed with material objects, stealing cups and rings and lockets to house shreds of his soul, Snape depends on very little outside his own mind. "
65 " This is the answer to Sirius’s question about why Dumbledore would hire someone who once worked for Voldemort. People can change, even if their spots cannot. Appearances and inner reality are not always the same. There are sometimes good reasons to present the self untruthfully, even if that can be a grueling ordeal, as Sirius well knows. And people who have undergone such transformations know things, can do things, that those innocent of such ordeals cannot. "
66 " Snape’s signature magic is magic that happens inside the mind. He was a Master of Death without needing any of the Deathly Hallows at all. "
67 " Lupin asks the students to reveal the thing they fear the most. Neville’s reply is “Professor Snape.” Lupin then instigates collective mockery of Snape using a sexist, ageist image that the students would never have come up with on their own. "
68 " Snape may be alone, but there are others who are thinking about what he’s doing, and by including these silences from two of the series’ most insightful characters, the author signals that the reader should, too. "
69 " He did not need the Resurrection Stone. He could recall the love in his interactions with Lily Evans as powerfully as the Resurrection Stone recalled Lily, James, Lupin, and Sirius for Harry. "
70 " Just as Snape created a classroom atmosphere in which his Slytherins were “excited” at the prospect of a classmate’s failure, humiliation, and fear for his pet, Lupin has gotten a roomful of pubescent Gryffindors to engage in collective sexual ridicule behind a Slytherin teacher’s back, including the alarming word “forced. "
71 " He did not need a cloak to become invisible. Going undercover as the right-hand man of the tyrant he brought down was the same magic on a grander scale. "
72 " What Harry knows is that Voldemort was shocked and fearful when his rebirth went awry. He had expected to kill Harry and ascend triumphantly back to power, not to be overpowered, for the first time, by the memories of his own crimes. "
73 " Snape died believing that Dumbledore meant to sacrifice Harry. Perhaps, once his portrait is installed, his portrait can talk to Dumbledore’s and understand better that Dumbledore meant to help Harry free himself of Voldemort. Perhaps Dumbledore’s portrait can finally explain that he withheld information about Horcruxes not for lack of trust but because he cared about Snape enough to protect his life. Perhaps, when she moves into the headmistress’s office, Professor McGonagall will get to speak to Snape’s portrait about the heartbreak of his apparent betrayal and her even greater heartbreak when she realized everything he endured while she attacked him. Whatever Snape’s portrait tells her, the other portraits can back up his story. They were witnesses to his final year. "
74 " with Dumbledore but with a literary figure from a different novel: Atticus Finch from Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, which Rowling once named as one of her top 10 recommended books for young readers. (Higgins, 2006) Scout, the narrator, remembers Atticus as “the bravest man who ever lived. "
75 " As a child, Harry had vehemently rejected the Sorting Hat’s assertion that he could do well in Slytherin. He was terrified to think that he had anything in common with Voldemort or that the attack might have made him more like Voldemort. If Harry can tell his child he was once considered for Slytherin, he must be healed from his old trauma. But it also means that he has accepted his true nature as genuinely Slytherin enough to be considered for that house, independent of and outlasting his trauma from Voldemort. If his child is Sorted into Slytherin, Harry will be prepared to tell him how Slytherin can help him on his way to greatness. His image of the quintessential Slytherin is no longer Voldemort but Snape. His image of bravery, that quintessential Gryffindor trait, is not any of the Gryffindor loved ones for whom he has named his children. In Harry’s story as he tells it, Severus Snape is the name he passes to his children to define bravery. "
76 " In the ensuing rush of adventure, there is little leisure for the reader to reflect upon how teen Snape would have felt glimpsing a werewolf at the end of a narrow tunnel, set up by his enemies. From the time Sirius and Lupin both headed back to his adult workplace, Snape has been battling memories of that episode. As far as Snape knows, the boy who once tried to get him killed and saw nothing wrong with turning his own werewolf friend into a killer could easily have become a mass murderer. "
77 " Unbeknownst to Harry, Dumbledore also bequeaths him a final message that he entrusts to Snape with instructions to deliver the message only when Harry is close to defeating Voldemort. Snape must stay alive long enough to deliver the message then and no sooner. He must remain tightly Occluded until he meets with Harry. Then he, too, can open at the close. There are other mysteries in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, but the revelation of Snape’s motives is the key to them all. After a buildup of a million words, Rowling finally shows us Snape as he truly is, the full story of how he became the right-hand man of two opposing generals and what was in his heart the entire time. "
78 " to the worthy. We have been wondering what Snape’s Patronus is. When it appears, at the book’s midpoint, it is the light that Harry has needed. Voldemort cannot touch this. It provides the guidance that Dumbledore doesn’t. There is comfort in this light, which takes the image of Lily Potter, the mate to James Potter’s silver stag. Snape and Harry have been strengthened by love from the same person. The silver doe tells us: follow the mother’s story. "
79 " In this volume, Snape is gone from the school narrative for chapters at a time, busy with his spy work. In his absence, the reader sees Harry experience many of the emotions that we have seen in Snape. "
80 " . The kids stay with Hagrid until the executioner arrives and they slip out the back. They hear what they believe is Buckbeak’s death: “without warning, the unmistakable swish and thud of an axe.” (HP/PoA, 331) With that sound, their trust in authority is severed. "