She longed for cutlasses, pistols, and brandy; she had to make do with coffee, and pencils, and verbs.

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.

When you live for many hundreds of years, you know that every opportunity will come again.

Maybe sometimes we don't do the right thing because the wrong thing looks more dangerous, and we don't want to look scared, so we go and do the wrong thing just because it's dangerous. We're more concerned with not looking scared than with judging right.

No,' he said, 'memory's a poor thing to have. It's your own real hair and mouth and arms and eyes and hands I want. I didn't know I could ever love anything so much.

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

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