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...
So Lyra and her dæmon turned away from the world they were born in, and looked towards the sun, and walked into the sky.
She had asked: What is he? A friend or an enemy?The alethiometer answered: He is a murderer.When she saw the answer, she relaxed at once. He could find food, and show her how to reach Oxford, and thos...
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.
On a cold, fretful afternoon in early October, 1872, a hansom cab drew up outside the offices of Lockhart and Selby, Shipping Agents, in the financial heart of London, and a young girl got out and pai...
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.
Living was hateful, and death was no better, and from end to end of the universe this was the first and last and only truth.
It takes long practice, yes. You have to work. Did you think you could snap your fingers, and have it as a gift? What is worth having is worth working for.
In some lights they were hardly there at all, just visible as a drifting quality in the light, a rhythmic evanescence, like veils of transparency turning before a mirror.
Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit.
Eventually, child, you will come to the land of the dead with no effort, no risk, a safe, calm journey, in the company of your own death, your special, devoted friend, who's been beside you every mome...
Did you seriously think for one moment, she said, sounding fierce now, that I would let this little baby, who has been given into our care, be taken away by three strangers on the strength of a single...
But think of Adam and Eve like an imaginary number, like the square root of minus one: you can never see any concrete proof that it exists, but if you include it in your equations, you can calculate a...
Aveva detto una volta a Serafina Pekkala che a lui volare non importava, che era soltanto un lavoro come un altro, ma non parlava sul serio. Levarsi in alto, con un buon vento alle spalle e un nuovo m...
Auf der Suche nach einer Beschäftigung ging Mary zu den Netzknüpfern und bot ihre Hilfe an. Als sie sah, wie die Mulefa arbeiteten, nicht jeder für sich nämlich, sondern immer zu zweit, weil sie jewei...
And at the word alone, Will felt a great wave of rage and despair moving outwards from a place deep within him, as if his mind were an ocean that some profound convulsion had disturbed. All his life h...
All the history of human life has been a struggle between wisdom and stupidity.
A human being with no daemon was like someone without a face, or with their ribs laid open and their heart torn out; something unnatural and uncanny that belonged to the world of nightghasts, not the...