Human beings can’t see anything without wanting to destroy it, Lyra. That’s original sin.
We can control the future, my boy, just as we wind up the mechanism in a clock. Say to yourself: I will win that race – I will come first – and you wind up the future like clockwork. The world has no choice but to obey! Can the hands of that old clock in the corner decide to stop? Can the spring in your watch decide to wind itself up and run backward? No! They have no choice. And nor has the future, once you have wound it up.
The sight filled the northern sky; the immensity of it was scarcely conceivable. As if from Heaven itself, great curtains of delicate light hung and trembled. Pale green and rose-pink, and as transparent as the most fragile fabric, and at the bottom edge a profound and fiery crimson like the fires of Hell, they swung and shimmered loosely with more grace than the most skillful dancer.
Make a noise in there and I won’t help you. You’re on your own.
That is a question with too complicated an answer.
War asks many people to do unreasonable things.
Why do they do these things to children, Pan? Do they all hate children so much, that they want to tear them apart like this? Why do they do it?
I stay here and drink spirits because the men here took my armor away, and without that, I can hunt seals but I can’t go to war; and I am an armored bear; war is the sea I swim in and the air I breathe.
Lyra bent over the open vessel and found the concentrated fragrance of every rose that had ever bloomed: a sweetness and power so profound that it moved beyond sweetness altogether and out of the other side of its own complexity into a realm of clear and simple purity and beauty. It was the smell of sunlight itself.
If you speak to people, you just attract their attention,” he said, with a shaking voice. “You should just keep quiet and still and they overlook you. I’ve been doing it all my life. I know how to do it. Your way, you just – you make yourself visible.
Perhaps some particles move backward in time; perhaps the future affects the past in some way we don’t understand; or perhaps the universe is simply more aware than we are.
This is a deep and uncomfortable paradox, which will not have escaped you; we can only defend democracy by being undemocratic. Every secret service knows this paradox.
Nothing is just anything.
Speaking for myself, I’ve always found great intelligence in a woman a highly attractive feature.
Shame on you! Think what this child has done! You might not have more courage, but you should be ashamed to show less.
You forget I am a woman, Your Eminence, and thus not so subtle as a prince of the Church.
Both of them sat silent on the moss-covered rock in the slant of sunlight through the old pines and thought how many tiny chances had conspired to bring them to this place. Each of those chances might have gone a different way.
Being cheerful starts now, Will thought as hard as he could, but it was like trying to hold a fighting wolf still in his arms when it wanted to claw at his face and tear out his throat; nevertheless, he did it, and he thought no one could see the effort it cost him.
Your death taps you on the shoulder, or takes your hand, and says, ‘Come along o’ me, it’s time.
It was nothing more than what it was.