His Dark Materials

by Philip Pullman

And now by a thousand winding channels and creeks and watercourses, gyptian boats were moving in towards the Byanplats, the only patch of slightly higher ground in the hundreds of square miles of marsh and bog.

“You en’t gyptian, Lyra. You might pass for gyptian with practice, but there’s more to us than gyptian language. There’s deeps in us and strong currents. We’re water people all through, and you en’t, you’re a fire person. What you’re most like is marsh-fire, that’s the place you have in the gyptian scheme; you got witch-oil in your soul. Deceptive, that’s what you are, child.

North and further north they ran, while the pallid noontide came and went and the twilight folded itself again around the world.

Lyra could see why Farder Coram loved her, and why it was breaking his heart, though she had known neither of those things a moment before.

Just the evening wind over the sage, and a ceegar, and a glass of bourbon whiskey.

Who knows what bears feel? But if a bear ever loved a human being, he loves her.

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.

And so the four travellers sailed on, sleeping in the ice-encrusted balloon, towards the rocks and glaciers, the fire-mines and the ice-forts of Svalbard.

The stars are alive, child. Did you know that? Everything out there is alive, and there are grand purposes abroad! The universe is full of intentions, you know. Everything happens for a purpose.

The idea hovered and shimmered delicately, like a soap bubble, and she dared not even look at it directly in case it burst. But she was familiar with the way of ideas, and she let it shimmer, looking away, thinking about something else.

So Lyra and her dæmon turned away from the world they were born in, and looked towards the sun, and walked into the sky.

It was worth living a difficult life, if you had a great aim like that.

Later, as the embers of a fire glowed in a circle of ashy rocks and the great hills lay calm under the moon, Joachim Lorenz told Serafina and Ruta Skadi about the history of his world.

The stars in this world were the same as theirs: the Milky Way blazed bright across the dome of the sky, and innumerable points of starlight dusted the dark, almost matching the moon for brightness

“Can is not the same as must.” “But if you must and you can, then there’s no excuse.

The Sun has left his blackness & has found a fresher morning, And the fair Moon rejoices in the clear & cloudless night William Blake

“I will love you for ever, 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 for ever, 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 pine 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