You don't win races by wishing, you win them by running faster than everyone else does.

You speak of destiny as if it was fixed.

And then what?" said her daemon sleepily. "Build what?" "The Republic of Heaven," said Lyra.

For a human being, nothing comes naturally,' said Grumman. 'We have to learn everything we do.

Everything has a meaning, if only we could read it.

But 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.

My books are about killing God.