Has the phrase, 'Yes, sir,' been completely excised from your vocabulary?"
There was but the slightest twitch of her eyebrow. "Yes, sir," she said.
and this:
"I'll be content if she simply learns that she is not the only intelligent life on the planet."
Filius winked. "Like father, like daughter, eh?"
The voice here is just so great. And this broke my heart:
"This is who I am when I have absolutely no meaningful work with which to occupy my endless days, when I find myself trapped in canvas, a sentient semblance of a being, eternally bound to a facsimile of living yet unable to move forward into the life I long hoped I might someday be permitted to live without constraint." [...] "Two hours, Potter." Snape spoke in a whisper. "Just two more hours, maybe three, and I would have been a free man."
Oh Severus. "Poor Severus" indeed. Albus doesn't know the half of it.