There’s another difference between us, Mr. Scoresby. A witch would no sooner give up flying than give up breathing. To fly is to be perfectly ourselves.
There he dwelt, a prisoner acting like a king.
The steamy, noisy kitchen was the safest place in the world, it seemed to him. Safety had never been anything to think about before; it was something you took for granted, like his mother’s endless, effortless, generous food, and the fact that there would always be hot plates ready to serve it on.
Keep away from the literal-minded folk, and ignore the scoffers.
Stories aren’t made of language: they’re made of something else. A little earlier I said that stories were about life; perhaps they’re made of life.
Eve was tempted not by wealth or love but by knowledge.
Do you think I need anything else?” “You could do with some sense,” came the reply. “Some faculty to enable you to recognize wisdom and incline you to respect and obey it.
The mind has plenty of ways of preventing you from writing, and paralysing self-consciousness is a good one. The only thing to do is ignore it, and remember what Vincent van Gogh said in one of his letters about the painter’s fear of the blank canvas – the canvas, he said, is far more afraid of the painter.
And she sobbed so passionately he thought that hearts really did break, and hers was breaking now, for she fell to the ground wailing and shuddering, and Pantalaimon beside her became a wolf and howled with bitter grief.
Does he think the job of a librarian is so simple, so empty of content, that anyone can step up and do it for a thank-you and a cup of tea? Does he think that all a librarian does is to tidy the shelves?
Behind them lay pain and death and fear; ahead of them lay doubt, and danger, and fathomless mysteries.
Death is going to die.
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.
Like a wave that has been building it’s strength over a thousand miles of ocean, and which makes little stir in the deep water, but which, when it reaches the shallows rears itself high up into the sky, terrifying the shore dwellers, before crashing down on land with irresistible power – so Iorek Byrnison rose up against Iofur, exploding upward from his firm footing on the dry rock and slashing with a ferocious left hand at the exposed jaw of Iofur Raknison.
Everything means something,” Lyra said severely. “We just have to find out how to read it.
It’s about wrong and less wrong. Bad and less bad.
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 moment of your life, who knows you better than yourself.
But then she remembered what the gyptians had said: Include things, don’t leave them out. Look at things in their context. Include everything.
It’s the oldest human problem, Lyra, an’ it’s the difference between good and evil. Evil can be unscrupulous, and good can’t. Evil has nothing to stop it doing what it wants, while good has one hand tied behind its back. To do the things it needs to do to win, it’d have to become evil to do ’em.
She was afraid of her father, and she admired him profoundly, and she thought he was stark mad; but who was she to judge?