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.
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.
The Lord of the Rings’ is fundamentally an infantile work. Tolkien is not interested in the way grownup, adult human beings interact with each other. He’s interested in maps and plans and languages and codes.
Thou shalt not might’ reach the head but it takes ‘Once upon a time’ to reach the heart. Also: We need stories so much that we’re even willing to read bad books to get them.
I will love you forever; whatever happens. Till I die and after I die, and when I find my way out of the land of the dead, I’ll drift about forever, all my atoms, till I find you again... ;.
The powers of this world are very strong. Men and women are moved by tides much fiercer than you can imagine, and they sweep us all up into the current. Go well, Lyra; bless you, child, bless you. Keep your own counsel.
All she knew was that she must be in love with someone, or she wouldn’t feel so miserable.
Lyra has never seen such a sight, never heard such a bellow; it was like a mountain laughing.
He meant the Kingdom was over, the Kingdom of Heaven, it was all finished. We shouldn’t live as if it mattered more than this life in this world, because where we are is always the most important place.
Still, Fritz was an optimist, and Karl was a pessimist, and that makes all the difference in the world.
No one, not even Shakespeare, surpasses Milton in his command of the sound, the music, the weight and taste and texture of English words.
All writing is difficult. The most you can hope for is a day when it goes reasonably easily. Plumbers don’t get plumber’s block, and doctors don’t get doctor’s block; why should writers be the only profession that gives a special name to the difficulty of working, and then expects sympathy for it?
The narrating voice that tells ‘Middlemarch’ is just as much a made-up character as Dorothea or Mr. Casaubon.
Take the anchor, there. The first meaning of that is hope, because hope holds you fast like an anchor so you don’t give way.
It was a jaw cracking, lung-bursting yawn that lasted almost a minute.
She was learning that if she pretended to be weak and frightened, and dabbed at her eyes with a lacy handkerchief, she could turn aside all manner of pressing questions.
True education flowers at the point when delight falls in love with responsibility.
You cannot change what you are, only what you do.
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.
A story, to me, has a particular sprite, like the angel of the spirit of that story – and it’s my job to attend to what it wants to do.