The Subtle Knife (His Dark Materials, #2)

by Philip Pullman

those were powers that were useful, but he might still have been untrustworthy or cowardly. A murderer was a worthy companion.

True invisibility was impossible, of course: this was mental magic, a kind of fiercely held modesty that could make the spell worker not invisible but simply unnoticed.

He wouldn’t confide in me any more than in his shaving mug.”

Was there only one world after all, which spent its time dreaming of others?

It’s like having to make a choice: a blessing or a curse. The one thing you can’t do is choose neither.”

“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.

“Then wherever he is, you can guide me to him as well,” she ordered them. Ruta Skadi was four hundred and sixteen years old, with all the pride and knowledge of an adult witch queen. She was wiser by far than any short-lived human, but she had not the slightest idea of how like a child she seemed beside these ancient beings. Nor did she know how far their awareness spread out beyond her like filamentary tentacles to the remotest corners of universes she had never dreamed of; nor that she saw them as human-formed only because her eyes expected to. If she were to perceive their true form, they would seem more like architecture than organism, like huge structures composed of intelligence and feeling. But they expected nothing else: she was very young.

If there was such a thing as shadow-colored, it was the blade of the subtle knife.

If there are other rules, I have forgotten them, and if I’ve forgotten them it is because they don’t matter.

are bewitched by this truth about human beings: that innocence is different from experience.

“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.

I found folly everywhere, but there were grains of wisdom in every stream of it.

felt the strangest of pleasures: that of offering eager obedience to a stronger power that was wholly right.

And if you break that oath, whatever remains of me will pursue whatever remains of

There was a great deal of pain waiting to spring on him, but it hadn’t raised the courage yet,

“I cain’t shoot a man in the back,” Lee said. “Shame to die with one bullet left, though.”

They say that people have been interfering with the atmosphere by putting chemicals in it, and the weather’s going out of control.” “Yeah, well, they have,” said Lyra, “and it is. And we’re here in the middle of it.”

“You think things have to be possible? Things have to be true!

only a name for what happens when matter begins to understand itself. Matter loves matter.