People are too complicated to have simple labels.
Lyra swore with every word she knew.
He sat down and collected his thoughts. They were quite easy to collect, because there weren't very many of them, and they all concerned the same subject--what a burden his life was.
Good intentions never wrote a story worth reading.
For a human being, nothing comes naturally,' said Grumman. 'We have to learn everything we do.
We have to build the Republic of Heaven where we are, because for us, there is no elsewhere.
Tutti siamo soggetti al fato. Però tutti dobbiamo agire come se non lo fossimo. O morire di disperazione.
The intentions of a tool are what it does. A hammer intends to strike, a vise intends to hold fast, a lever intends to lift. They are what it is made for. But sometimes a tool may have other uses that...
The Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake.
Every advance in human life, every scrap of knowledge and wisdom and decency we have has been torn by one side from the teeth of the other. Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over...
All she knew was that she must be in love with someone, or she wouldn't feel so miserable.
The act of true reading is in its very essence democratic. Consider the nature of what happens when we read a book - and I mean, of course, a work of literature, not an instruction manual or a textboo...
Where there are priests, there is fear of Dust.
Probly.
That is what the Church does, and every church is the same: control, destroy, obliterate every good feeling.
My flat's about half a mile away, and you know what I'd like most of all in the world? I'd like a cup of tea. Come on, let's go and put the kettle on.
Maybe so, he said, but whatever little chance of safety there is, I want her to have it.
Lyra at eighteen sitting intent and absorbed in Duke Humfrey’s Library with the alethiometer and a pile of leather-bound books. Tucking the hair back behind her ears, pencil in mouth, finger moving do...
But what matters is not the similarities your imagination finds, but the similarities that are implicit in the image, and they are not necessarily the same. I have noticed that the more imaginative re...
As for what it's against - the story is against those who pervert and misuse religion, or any other kind of doctrine with a holy book and a priesthood and an apparatus of power that wields unchallenge...