The Amber Spyglass Quotes
"Matter loves matter. It seeks to know more about itself, and Dust is formed."
"The first angels condensed out of Dust, and the Authority was the first of all."
"He told those who came after him that he had created them, but it was a lie."
"The Authority himself dwells in a chamber at the heart of the Mountain."
"Everything about it is secret. Even the churches don’t know; they tell their believers that they’ll live in Heaven, but that’s a lie."
"I hate this, truly, truly, I hate this killing! When will it stop?"
"The knife is a potent weapon, and Lord Asriel would be glad to have you on his side."
"She’s the most important thing, and you’re forgetting her completely."
"I think I’m just trying to wake up—I’m so afraid of sleeping all my life and then dying—I want to wake up first! I wouldn’t care if it was just for an hour, as long as I was properly alive and awake."
"I will wake up and I won’t forget, so there."
"I dunno who that is, and he won’t come here, and if he does, he won’t know me."
"It may be, gentlemen, that the Holy Church itself was brought into being to perform this very task and to perish in the doing of it."
"Quick work," said the Chevalier. "A hundred to one he doesn’t tell them about his assassin, though."
"It’s the logical thing to do," she said. "Very logical people."
"Go well, Salmakia. Tomorrow at the fountain."
"Nothing made of iron or steel is a mystery to a bear."
"Then we shall help," said the bear, and Will’s heart leapt with pleasure.
"First, I would do whatever serves the bears. Second, whatever serves the child, or the witch, or avenges my dead comrade Lee Scoresby."
"My boy," he said, and then closed his eyes and began to intone a prayer or a psalm.
"You fought for this, and lost two fingers?" the bear said. "Show me the wound."
"That was your armor," he said, and dropped the pieces with a clatter onto the rest at his feet, "and this is my knife."
"Sometimes his grief would become too strong for him to put up with, and he’d leave the boat and fly high among the clouds, searching for any patch of light or taste of air, any shooting stars or pressure ridges that might remind him of experiences he had shared."
"I can think of it," said the bear, "but not understand what I am thinking. It is the strangest thing I have ever seen."
"We shall survive, and when things return to what they should be, and the Arctic freezes once more, we shall still be alive to go back and claim it."
"Come, then, Will," said Iorek Byrnison, "and we shall find Lyra."
"I love her so much I’ve given up everything I had—a great career, great happiness, position and wealth—everything, to come to this cave in the mountains and live on dry bread and sour fruit, just so I can keep my daughter alive."
"The Church will destroy me, too, as well as Lyra, if they find us. I’m alone, Will, just me in a cave with my daughter, and all the forces of all the worlds are trying to track us down."
"In the light of your report, here is a change of plan."
"The essential thing was speed: getting their troops on the ground first would make all the difference."
"The spiral fins, made of horn, gave the bolt a spin and made the weapon as accurate as a rifle."
"There was a dream that had occupied her for a long time, and now it had returned, and little whimpers of pity and rage and Lyratic resolution shook her breast and her throat."
"The only world he could find with the same conformation of ground was a bare, rocky place, where the moon glared down from a starry sky onto a bleached bone-white ground where little insects crawled."
"We must be very quick and completely silent. No noise, not even a whisper."
"The intentions of a tool are what it does. A hammer intends to strike, a vise intends to hold fast, a lever intends to lift."
"The most deadly fighting machines are little toys compared to that knife; the harm it can do is unlimited."
"I fear what it can do. I have never known anything so dangerous."
"You must no longer think about your mother. You must put her aside. If your mind is divided, the knife will break."
"This world is different. We intend to be free citizens of the Republic of Heaven."
"Our business is to keep promises, no matter how difficult they are."
"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."
"You know, secretly, I’m deadly scared. And I wish I’d never had that dream, and I wish Will hadn’t thought of using the knife to go there. But we did, so we can’t get out of it."
"She feared me and hated me, and she would have fled from my presence like a bird from a cat if I hadn’t drugged her into oblivion. Do you know what that means to a mother?"
"My heart nearly stopped… It was what they—we—what I had done to other children, but when it was mine… Oh, you can’t conceive the horror of that moment, I hope you never suffer as I did then…"
"The Kingdom of Heaven has been known by that name since the Authority first set himself above the rest of the angels. And we want no part of it."
"Lyra will somehow, sometime soon, be tempted, as Eve was—that’s what they say. What form this temptation will take, I don’t know, but she’s growing up, after all."
"We’re not going to invade the Kingdom, but if the Kingdom invades us, they had better be ready for war, because we are prepared."
"Well, King, you were quite right," he said, "and I should have listened to you in the first place. She is Lyra’s mother; I might have expected something like that."
"What, and destroy a perfectly good aircraft? Certainly not."
"I can’t see sraf as you can," she said, "but I would like to make a mirror out of the sap lacquer, because I think that might help me see it."
"And now she has succeeded, she is ready to learn more about what she must do to help us."
"We’re going to the world of the dead. We don’t know where it is, but the knife’ll find it. That’s what we’re going to do."
"You must move along, please. You must go to the holding area."
"Go and find somewhere to stay," said the man, not unkindly. "Just ask. Everybody’s waiting, same as you."
"They’re not people," said the Lady Salmakia. "They’re not even ghosts. They’re something else, but I don’t know what."
"No, no, Lyra, no, go away, let’s go back, please…"
"Excuse me," said Lyra, stepping forward in her best polite way, as if the housekeeper of Jordan College were glaring at her.
"And everyone has their own death?" said Will, marveling.
"Your death taps you on the shoulder, or takes your hand, and says, ‘Come along o’ me, it’s time.’"
"Ah," said Lyra, "that’s what we need to know, because we’re trying to find the land of the dead, and we don’t know how to get there."
"My heart, Will…" she groaned, and clung to him, her wet face contorted with pain.
"You don’t know," she cried, "you just don’t know what I got in my head or my heart, do you?"
"Your mother is alone. We shall send her nightmares. We shall scream at her in her sleep!"
"This is where they all are, everyone that’s ever died…"
"You’ll drift apart, it’s true, but you’ll be out in the open, part of everything alive again."
"It’s the greatest blow you could strike. The Authority will be powerless after this."
"There’s probably a great deal that’s mysterious to you, my Lord President, starting with the relations between a mother and her child."
"I was going to keep her safe until the danger had passed."
"Is Lord Asriel actively searching for the girl and the boy?"
"Well, where is God, if he’s alive? And why doesn’t he speak anymore?"
"Tell your daemon to calm down, or I’ll disable him."
"You do like to keep your guests entertained."
"If there’s an invisible assassin in this place, I can only imagine it’s the Devil himself."
"Please don’t stop. I’ll follow you—we all will. Please keep going, No-Name."
"We have to build the Republic of Heaven where we are, because for us there is no elsewhere."
"His voice faded. She wanted to put her arms around him, but of course that was impossible."
"And if we drive at them with force and determination, we can sweep aside those infinite numbers as you can sweep your hand through mist."
"It was less like a rock than like a force field, manipulating space itself to enfold and stretch and layer it into galleries and terraces, chambers and colonnades and watchtowers of air and light and vapor."
"Every scrap of shelter and deceit was stripped away, and she stood naked, body and ghost and daemon together, under the ferocity of Metatron’s gaze."
"You have never from your earliest years shown a shred of compassion or sympathy or kindness without calculating how it would return to your advantage."
"All I could hope was that my crimes were so monstrous that the love was no bigger than a mustard seed in the shadow of them, and I wished I’d committed even greater ones to hide it more deeply still…"
"I fought because I had to. I can’t choose my nature, but I can choose what I do."
"Tell them stories. They need the truth. You must tell them true stories, and everything will be well, just tell them stories."
"It was the dream she’d tried to describe to Atal, the night picture; but as Mary tried to find it again, it dissolved and drifted apart, just as these presences did in the open air. The dream was gone."
"The sun hadn’t long risen, and the air had a fresh bloom."
"The more she looked, the more she saw all kinds of order and carefulness in the village, like the layers of meaning in the alethiometer."
"Part of her mind was eager to puzzle it all out, to step lightly from similarity to similarity, from one meaning to another as she did with the instrument."
"Well, I’m not going anywhere till Pan comes back, she said to herself."
"Yesterday you were too tired and all you could do was rest. But you look a lot more lively today."
"The Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake, that’s all."
"I used to feel I was connected to the whole of the universe."
"And it was plain that everything was throbbing with purpose and meaning, but she was cut off from it."
"I didn’t know whether I was happy or unhappy, but something very strange had happened."
"Matter loved Dust. It didn’t want to see it go."
"All his body thrilled with it, and he answered her in the same words, kissing her hot face over and over again."
"Around them there was nothing but silence, as if all the world were holding its breath."
"Oh, Baruch, my dear, I can do no more. Will and the girl are safe, and everything will be well, but this is the end for me, though truly I died when you did, Baruch, my beloved."
"Every atom of me and every atom of you… We’ll live in birds and flowers and dragonflies and pine trees and in clouds and in those little specks of light you see floating in sunbeams…"
"We’ll cling together so tight that nothing and no one’ll ever tear us apart."
"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."
"Grace attained like that is deeper and fuller than grace that comes freely, and furthermore, once you’ve gained it, it will never leave you."