Rowling closed her speech by expressing one final hope for the graduates: that they would find the kind of lifelong friendships she herself found at her own graduation. The friends she sat with that day became her children's godparents and the people she turned to in times of real trouble. She then left the graduates with the words of Seneca, the Roman philosopher she discovered when she fled down the classics corridor at university in search of ancient wisdom. Quoting him, she offered the simple but profound observation that the measure of a life is not its length but its quality. It was a fitting conclusion from an author whose own tale had been anything but straightforward.