Northern Lights (His Dark Materials, #1)

by Philip Pullman

“That’s the duty of the old,” said the Librarian, “to be anxious on behalf of the young. And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old.”

“Why didn’t their dæmons find me, though?” she asked afterwards, and Ma showed her the lining of the secret space: cedarwood, which had a soporific effect on dæmons; and it was true that Pantalaimon had spent the whole time happily asleep by Lyra’s head.

“I en’t never deceived anyone! You ask…”

because your father is Lord Asriel.”

So that’s how she finds out in the book. Interesting

“Mrs Coulter?” said Lyra, quite stupefied. “She en’t my mother?” “She is. And if your father had been free she wouldn’t never have dared to defy him, and you’d still be at Jordan, not knowing a thing. But what the Master was a-doing letting you go is a mystery I can’t explain. He was charged with your care.

So the master is a snake.

She longed to touch that fur, to rub her cheeks against it, but of course she never did; for it was the grossest breach of etiquette imaginable to touch another person’s dæmon. Dæmons might touch each other, of course, or fight; but the prohibition against human-dæmon contact went so deep that even in battle no warrior would touch an enemy’s dæmon. It was utterly forbidden.

The witches have the power to separate theirselves from their dæmons a mighty sight further’n what we can.

And they have spoken of a child such as this, who has a great destiny that can only be fulfilled elsewhere – not in this world, but far beyond. Without this child, we shall all die. So the witches say. But she must fulfil this destiny in ignorance of what she is doing, because only in her ignorance can we be saved.

The price is my armour. I want it back, and then I shall never need spirits again.”

A human being with no dæmon was like someone without a face, or with their ribs laid open and their heart torn out: something unnatural and uncanny that belonged to the world of night-ghasts, not the waking world of sense.

“By not being human,” he said. “That’s why you could never trick a bear. We see tricks and deceit as plain as arms and legs. We can see in a way humans have forgotten. But you know about this; you can understand the symbol-reader.”

“We are all subject to the fates. But we must all act as if we are not,” said the witch, “or die of despair.

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.

But you cannot change what you are, only what you do.