You are an enemy of the Church, Lee Scoresby. By their fruits shall ye know them.
Which made her barefaced lies all the more effective, Lord Asriel thought with disgust; she lied in the very marrow of her bones.
When she saw how they worked, not on their own but two by two, working their trunks together to tie a knot, she realized why they'd been so astonished by her hands, because of course she could tie kno...
What is that other universe? she said. One of uncountable billions of parallel worlds. The witches have known about them for centuries, but the first theologians to prove their existence mathematicall...
We are all subject to the fates. But we must all act as if we are not, said the witch, or die of despair. There is a curious prophecy about this child: she is destined to bring about the end of destin...
To stop you getting impatient, that’s why. You don’t really want to stand around at the cocktail party being all sweet and pretty. She’s just making a pet out of you. Lyra turned her back and closed h...
This book contains a story and several other things. The other things might be connected with the story, or they might not; they might be connected to stories that haven't appeared yet. It's not easy...
There are some who live by every rule and cling tightly to their rectitude because they fear being swept away by a tempest of passion, and there are others who cling to the rules because they fear tha...
Then it started to rain, so she went inside and made some coffee and did what she had never done in her life: tried the newspaper crossword. What a stupid exercise, said her dæmon after five minutes....
The inn was an old stone-built rambling comfortable sort of place. There was a terrace above the river, where peacocks (one called Norman and the other called Barry) stalked among the drinkers, helpin...
The idea hovered and shimmered delicately, like a soap bubble, and she dared not even look at it directly in case it burst. But she was familiar with the way of ideas, and she let it shimmer, looking...
That's the duty of the old, said the Librarian, to be anxious on behalf of the young. And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old.
That afternoon Malcolm went to the lean-to and inspected the improvements to La Belle Sauvage. The tarpaulin of coal-silk was as light and impermeable (he tried it) as Mr van Texel had said, and the c...
She longed for cutlasses, pistols, and brandy; she had to make do with coffee, and pencils, and verbs.
Seems to me- Lee said, feeling for the words, seems to me the place you fight cruelty is where you find it, and the place you give help is where you see it needed....
Or when a good character does something bad? It’s probably better to think about good or bad actions rather than good or bad characters. People are complicated.
One future would close for ever as the other began to unfold.
Novels and stories are not arguments; they set out not to convince, but to beguile.
No,' he said, 'memory's a poor thing to have. It's your own real hair and mouth and arms and eyes and hands I want. I didn't know I could ever love anything so much...
No literary work longer than a haiku is going to be entirely without faults.