Truly, he said, I am dead … I’m dead, and I’m going to Hell … Hush, said Lyra, we’ll go together.
This is a deep and uncomfortable paradox, which will not have escaped you: we can only defend democracy by being undemocratic.
The steamy, noisy kitchen was the safest place in the world, it seemed to him. Safety had never been anything to think about before; it was something you took for granted, like his mother’s endless, e...
The mind has plenty of ways of preventing you from writing, and paralysing self-consciousness is a good one. The only thing to do is ignore it, and remember what Vincent van Gogh said in one of his le...
The children will come to no harm.Except for the older ones. Like that poor kid down there.Mr. Scoresby, that is the way this world works. And if you want to put an end to cruelty and injustice, you m...
The Authority considers that conscious beings of every kind have become dangerously independent, so Metatron is going to intervene much more actively in human affairs.
That's the duty of the old,' said the Librarian, 'to be anxious on the behalf of the young. And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old.'They sat for a while longer, and then parted,...
Still, Fritz was an optimist, and Karl was a pessimist, and that makes all the difference in the world.
Sticks and stones, I'll break yer bones, but names ain't worth a quarrel.
Men pass in front of our eyes like butterflies, creatures of a brief season. We love them; they are brave, proud, beautiful, clever; and they die almost at once. They die so soon that our hearts are c...
Maybe sometimes we don’t do the right thing because the wrong thing looks more dangerous, and we don’t want to look scared, so we go and do the wrong thing just because it’s dangerous. We
Lyra felt herself moving into a kind of trance beyond sleep and waking: a state of conscious dreaming, almost, in which she was dreaming that she was being carried by bears to a city in the stars. She
Looking at them now, thought Jim, you'd never believe they weren't in love with each other, and not with a hopeless, doomed obsession like poor Isabel Meredith. This was what love ought to be like: pl...
Labour without joy is base. Labour without sorrow is base.Sorrow without labour is base. Joy without labour is base. • JOHN RUSKIN
It was the loneliness of his death that upset Malcolm most.
If that was Tom Simms, said Audrey, I’d say he was probably drunk and his mermaid was a porpoise.
I think we need to tell each other everything we’ve found out. And it’ll take us a good long time, and we might as well keep our hands busy while we’re doing it, so
He was never the creator. He was an angel like ourselves—the first angel, true, the most powerful, but he was formed of Dust as we are, and Dust is only a name for what happens when matter begins to u...
He couldn't possibly have said why. He knew it at once, as strongly as he knew that fire burned and kindness was good.
Friends … They come to your house and they know your parents and.… Sometimes a boy might ask me around to his house, and I might go or I might not, but I could never ask him back. So I never had frien...