Philip Pullman

The fairy tale is in a perpetual state of becoming and alteration. To keep to one version or one translation alone is to put robin redbreast in a cage.

Princess, princess, youngest daughter,Open up and let me in!Or else your promise by the waterIsn__ worth a rusty pin.Keep your promise, royal daughter,Open up and let me in!

she allowed herself to dwell on the cause of this strange, apprehensive exultation that she sensed flickering at the edge of her mind: it was the rarest thing of all - a man whom she knew at once, and without any qualification, to be her equal.

What work do I have to do then?" said Will, but went on at once, "No, on second thought, don't tell me. I shall decide what I do. If you say my work is fighting, or healing, or exploring, or whatever you might say, I'll always be thinking about it. And if I do end up doing that, I'll be resentful because it'll feel as if I didn't have a choice, and if I don't do it, I'll feel guilty because I should. Whatever I do, I will choose it, no one else.

The evening sky was awash with peach, apricot, cream: tender little ice-cream clouds in a wide orange sky.

I__ working on another Lyra book right now _ it__ called The Book of Dust.__t__ going very well and it will be finished when I write the words __he End_.

She found out that having something to do prevented you from feeling seasick, and that even a job like scrubbing a deck could be satisfying, if it was done in a seamanlike way. She was very taken with this notion, and later on she folded the blankets on her bunk in a seamanlike way, and put her possessions in the closet in a seamanlike way, and used 'stow' instead of 'tidy' for the process of doing so. After two days at sea, Lyra decided that this was the life for her.

Blake said Milton was a true poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it. I am of the Devil's party and know it.

The children will come to no harm.""Except for the older ones. Like that poor kid down there.""Mr. Scoresby, that is the way this world works. And if you want to put an end to cruelty and injustice, you must take me farther on. I have a job to do.""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.

All she knew was that she must be in love with someone, or she wouldn't feel so miserable.

She shook her head and whispered, "No. No! That can't be true. Impossible!""You think things have to be possible? Things have to be true!

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.

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.

I__ with the fool in the psalm. You thought we could get on without you; no _ you didn__ care whether we got on without you or not. You just got up and left. So that__ what we__e doing, we__e getting on.

The Specters feast as vampires feast on blood, but the Specters_ food is attention. A conscious and informed interest in the world. The immaturity of children is less attractive to them.

You going to be a scientist when you grow up?_ That sort of question deserved a blank stare, which it got.

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....

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