If you want something you can have it, but only if you want everything that goes with it, including all the hard work and the despair, and only if you’re willing to risk failure.
That’s the duty of the old, to be anxious on behalf of the young. And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old.
You don’t win races by wishing, you win them by running faster than everyone else does.
We shouldn’t live as if [other worlds] mattered more than this life in this world, because where we are is always the most important place.
There’s a hunger for stories in all of us, adults too. We need stories so much that we’re even willing to read bad books to get them, if the good books won’t supply them.
I am a strong believer in the tyranny, the dictatorship, the absolute authority of the writer.
When you choose one way out of many, all the ways you don’t take are snuffed out like candles, as if they’d never existed.
Hope holds you fast like an anchor so you don’t give way.
After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.
I have stolen ideas from every book I have ever read.
I am a religious person, although I am not a believer.
Religion grants its adherents malign, intoxicating and morally corrosive sensations. Destroying intellectual freedom is always evil, but only religion makes doing evil feel quite so good.
One moment several things are possible, the next moment only one happens, and the rest don’t exist. Except that other worlds have sprung into being, on which the did happen.
when you’re young you do think that things last forever unfortunately they don’t Lyra.
If there is a war to be fought, we don’t consider cost one of the factors in deciding whether or not to fight.
I don’t know where I belong, so I’m free. No one’s got a hold on me.
Maybe art itself was a kind of voodoo, possessing you, giving you supernatural power, letting you see in the dark.
He let her do it, then looked around for his fingers. There they were, curled like a bloody quotation mark on the lead. He laughed.
We are all subject to the fates. But we must act as if we are not, or die of despair.
There’s been terrible things we seen, en’t there? And more a coming, more’n likely. So I think I’d rather not know what’s in the future. I’ll stick to the present.
For a human being, nothing comes naturally,’ said Grumman. ‘We have to learn everything we do.
She has committed great sins, but they’ve been forgiven, and that’s why she loves so deeply.
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 continually wracked with pain.
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.
I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are.
Around them there was nothing but silence, as if all the world were holding its breath.
Just be yourself. You don’t have to put on an act.””To be myself, I have to put on an act,” Ginny said bitterly.”What’s that mean?””It means I don’t know who I am.
It might have been a new way for her heart to beat.
she delighted in being of the same substance as them, and in knowing that when she died her flesh would nourish other lives as they had nourished her.
I was connected to God like that, and because he was there, I was connected to the whole of his creation.
Her upbringing had given her an independence of mind that made her more like a girl of today than one of her own time – which was why she had walked out, and why she was not daunted by the prospect of being alone.
When you live for many hundreds of years, you know that every opportunity will come again.
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….
You going to be a scientist when you grow up?” That sort of question deserved a blank stare, which it got.
The Specters feast as vampires feast on blood, but the Specters’ food is attention. A conscious and informed interest in the world. The immaturity of children is less attractive to them.
I’m with the fool in the psalm. You thought we could get on without you; no – you didn’t care whether we got on without you or not. You just got up and left. So that’s what we’re doing, we’re getting on.
A few minutes after he arrived, Lee was talking to a group of astronomers eager to learn what news he could bring them, for there are few natural philosophers as frustrated as astronomers in a fog.
She shook her head and whispered, “No. No! That can’t be true. Impossible!””You think things have to be possible? Things have to be true!
All she knew was that she must be in love with someone, or she wouldn’t feel so miserable.
Blake said Milton was a true poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it. I am of the Devil’s party and know it.
I’m working on another Lyra book right now – it’s called The Book of Dust.“It’s going very well and it will be finished when I write the words ‘The End’.
The evening sky was awash with peach, apricot, cream: tender little ice-cream clouds in a wide orange sky.
Princess, princess, youngest daughter,Open up and let me in!Or else your promise by the waterIsn’t worth a rusty pin.Keep your promise, royal daughter,Open up and let me in!
The fairy tale is in a perpetual state of becoming and alteration. To keep to one version or one translation alone is to put robin redbreast in a cage.
I don’t like rats any more than the next bloke, but they ain’t wicked and cruel like people can be. They’re just ratty in their habits.
We measure the value of a civilized society by the number of Libraries it opens, not the number it closes down.