“I'll be looking for you, Will, every moment, every single moment. And when we do find each other again, we'll cling together so tight that nothing and no one'll ever tear us apart. Every atom of me...”

“I told him I was going to betray you, and betray Lyra, and he believed me because I was corrupt and full of wickedness; he looked so deep I felt sure he'd see the truth. But I lied too well. I was ...”

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

“I cant bear the thought of oblivion, Asriel, she continued. Sooner anything than that. I used to think pain would be worseto be tortured foreverI thought that must be worse . . . But as long as you...”

“Thats the duty of the old, to be anxious on behalf of the young. And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old.”

“We shouldn't live as if [other worlds] mattered more than this life in this world, because where we are is always the most important place.”

“Sibyl, what do you want?I want to live, the Sibyl said, and her voice rang rich and full. I want to keep on living forever and watching heroes and fools and knights go up and down, into the world a...”

“When God is driven to the periphery of the public square, the human spiritual capacity longs for exercise, and it often finds it in the suspension of disbelief and activity of the imagination that ...”

“When is a monster not a monster? Oh, when you love it.”

“...the values ascribed to the Indian will depend on what the white writer feels about Nature, and America has always had mixed feelings about that. At one end of the spectrum is Thoreau, wishing to...”

“Literature is news which stays news.”

“If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, When youre ready.”