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Lyra’s knowledge had great gaps in it, like a map of the world largely eaten by mice,
Ma Costa came down, swathed in an old tweed coat on which the damp had settled like a thousand tiny pearls.
see the Master as a man having terrible choices to make; whatever he chooses will do harm, but maybe if he does the right thing, a little less harm will come about than if he chooses wrong. God preserve me from having to make that sort of choice.
Being a practiced liar doesn’t mean you have a powerful imagination. Many good liars have no imagination at all; it’s that which gives their lies such wide-eyed conviction.
A fresh seal lay on the snow. The bear sliced it open with a claw and showed Lyra where to find the kidneys. She ate one raw: it was warm and soft and delicious beyond imagining.
I will have to take your word for it.
think of Adam and Eve like an imaginary number, like the square root of minus one: you can never see any concrete proof that it exists, but if you include it in your equations, you can calculate all manner of things that couldn’t be imagined without it.
Thorold was an elderly man, but he was healthy and vigorous, and he felt flattered by the attention of this young witch and her beauty, as any man would. He was shrewd, though, too, and he knew the attention was not really on him but on what he knew; and he was honest, so he did not draw out his telling for much longer than he needed.
“What d’you want to know for, anyway, Lee?” said Sam Cansino. “He owes me some money,” said Lee Scoresby. This explanation was so satisfying that it stopped their curiosity at once.
A few minutes after he arrived, Lee was talking to a group of astronomers eager to learn what news he could bring them, for there are few natural philosophers as frustrated as astronomers in a fog.
And he’d learned that the object of a school fight was not to gain points for style but to force your enemy to give in, which meant hurting him more than he was hurting you. He knew that you had to be willing to hurt someone else, too, and he’d found out that not many people were, when it came to it; but he knew that he was.
“Seems to me—” Lee said, feeling for the words, “seems to me the place you fight cruelty is where you find it, and the place you give help is where you see it needed.
There’s thirty, forty men with guns all coming for us. Imperial soldiers, what’s more. Survival first, morals later.”
"Grub first. Then ethics."
--Mackie Messer, Three-Penny Opera
Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit.
“You think things have to be possible? Things have to be true!
choose one way out of many, all the ways you don’t take are snuffed out like candles, as if they’d never existed. At the moment all Will’s choices existed at once. But to keep them all in existence meant doing nothing. He had to choose, after all.
truth that’s told with bad intent Beats all the lies you can invent.
Blake
Mrs. Coulter, I am a king, but it’s my proudest task to join Lord Asriel in setting up a world where there are no kingdoms at all. No kings, no bishops, no priests. The Kingdom of Heaven has been known by that name since the Authority first set himself above the rest of the angels. And we want no part of it. This world is different. We intend to be free citizens of the Republic of Heaven.”
Her face was calm and kindly, not beautiful, not pretty, but the very sort of face you would be glad to see if you were ill or unhappy or frightened.
“It would be merciful to kill it,” said Tialys. “How do you know?” said Lyra. “It might still like being alive, in spite of everything.” “If we killed it, we’d be taking it with us,” said Will. “It wants to stay here. I’ve killed enough living things. Even a filthy stagnant pool might be better than being dead.” “But if it’s in pain?” said Tialys. “If it could tell us, we’d know. But since it can’t, I’m not going to kill it. That would be considering our feelings rather than the toad’s.”
There was a strange sound, like the murmur and crackle you hear before you realize that what you’re hearing is your house on fire.
Between them they helped the ancient of days out of his crystal cell; it wasn’t hard, for he was as light as paper, and he would have followed them anywhere, having no will of his own, and responding to simple kindness like a flower to the sun.
“When you stopped believing in God,” he went on, “did you stop believing in good and evil?” “No. But I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are. All we can say is that this is a good deed, because it helps someone, or that’s an evil one, because it hurts them. People are too complicated to have simple labels.”
All the different bells of the city chimed, once each, this one high, that one low, some close by, others farther off, one cracked and peevish, another grave and sonorous, but agreeing in all their different voices on what the time was, even if some of them got to it a little more slowly than others.
I have stolen ideas from every book I have ever read. My principle in researching for a novel is “Read like a butterfly, write like a bee,”
