“― Can is not the same as must.
― But if you must and you can, then there’s no excuse.”
His Dark Materials (The Amber Spyglass), Philip Pullman
“All the history of human life has been a struggle between wisdom and stupidity.”
His Dark Materials (The Amber Spyglass), Philip Pullman
“― Oh, Will – she said. – What can we do? Whatever can we do? I want to live with you forever. I want to kiss you and lie down with you and wake up with you every day of my life till I die, years and years and years away. I don’t want a memory, just a memory…
― No – he said – memory’s a poor thing to have. It’s your own real hair and mouth and arms and eyes and hands I want. I didn’t know I could ever love anything so much. Oh, Lyra, I wish this night would never end! If only we could stay like this, and the world would stop turning, and everyone else could fall into a sleep…
― Everyone except us! And you and I could live here forever and just love each other.
― 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…
― I’ll be looking for you, Will, every moment, every single moment. And when we do find each other again, we’ll cling together so tight that nothing and no one’ll ever tear us apart. Every atom of me and every atom of you… We’ll live in birds and flowers and dragonflies and pin trees and in clouds and in those little specks of light you see floating in sunbeams… And when they use our atoms to make new lives, they won’t just be able to take one, they’ll have to take two, one of you and one of me, we’ll be joined so tight…
They lay side by side, hand in hand, looking at the sky.”
His Dark Materials (The Amber Spyglass), Philip Pullman
“Maybe sometimes we don’t do the right thing because the wrong thing looks more dangerous, and we don’t want to look scared, so we go and do the wrong thing just because it’s dangerous. We’re more concerned with not looking scared than with judging right.”
His Dark Materials (The Amber Spyglass), Philip Pullman
“Even if it means oblivion, friends, I’ll welcome it, because it won’t be nothing. We’ll be alive again in a thousand blades of grass, and a million leaves; we’ll be falling in the raindrops and blowing in the fresh breeze; we’ll be glittering in the dew under the stars and the moon out there in the physical world, which is our true home and always was.”
His Dark Materials (The Amber Spyglass), Philip Pullman
“― But it gradually seemed to me that I’d made myself believe something that wasn’t true. I’d made myself believe that I was fine and happy and fulfilled on my own without the love of anyone else. Being in love was like China: you knew it was there, and no doubt it was very interesting, and some people went there, but I never would. I’d spend all my life without ever going to China, but it wouldn’t matter, because there was all the rest of the world to visit… And I thought: am I really going to spend the rest of my life without feeling that again? I thought: I want to go to China. It’s full of treasures and strangeness and mysteries and joy.”
His Dark Materials (The Amber Spyglass), Philip Pullman
“Lee saw the fireball and head through the roar in his ears Hester saying:
― That’s the last of them, Lee.
He said, or thought:
― Those poor men didn’t have to come to this, nor did we.
― We held them off. We held out. We’re a-helping Lyra – she said.
Then she was pressing her little proud broken self against his face, as close as she could get, and then they died.”
His Dark Materials (The Subtle Knife), Philip Pullman
“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.”
His Dark Materials (The Subtle Knife), Philip Pullman
“― For a human being, nothing comes naturally – said Grumman. – We have to learn everything we do.”
His Dark Materials (The Subtle Knife), Philip Pullman
“He dared to do what men and women don’t even dare to think. And look what he’s done already: he’s torn open the sky, he’s opened the way to another world. Who else has ever done that? Who else could think of it?”
His Dark Materials (The Subtle Knife), Philip Pullman
“― We are all subject to the fates. But we must act as if we are not – said the witch – or die of despair. There is a curious prophecy about this child: she is destined to bring about the end of destiny. But she must do so without knowing what she is doing, as if it were her nature and not her destiny to do it. If she’s told what she must do, it will all fail; death will sweep through all the worlds; it will be the triumph of despair, forever. The universes will all become nothing more than interlocking machines, blind and empty of thought, feeling, life…”
His Dark Materials (The Golden Compass), Philip Pullman
“You speak of destiny as if it was fixed.”
His Dark Materials (The Golden Compass), Philip Pullman
“If a witch needs something, another witch will give it to her. If there is war to be fought, we don’t consider cost one of the factors in deciding whether or not it is right to fight. Nor do we have any notion of honor. An insult to a bear is a deadly thing. To us… unconceivable. How could you insult a witch? What would it matter if you did?”
His Dark Materials (The Golden Compass), Philip Pullman
“Lonely? I don’t know. They tell me this is cold. I don’t know what cold is, because I don’t freeze. So I don’t know what lonely means either. Bears are made to be solitary.”
His Dark Materials (The Golden Compass), Philip Pullman
“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.”
His Dark Materials (The Amber Spyglass), Philip Pullman
