Philip Pullman

All writing is difficult. The most you can hope for is a day when it goes reasonably easily. Plumbers don__ get plumber__ block, and doctors don__ get doctor__ block; why should writers be the only profession that gives a special name to the difficulty of working, and then expects sympathy for it?

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

This is what__l happen,_ she said, __nd it__ true, perfectly true. When you go out of here, all the particles that make you up will loosen and float apart, just like your daemons did. If you__e seen people dying, you know what that looks like. But your daemons en__ just nothing now; they__e part of everything. All the atoms that were them, they__e gone into the air and the wind and the trees and the earth and all the living things. They__l never vanish. They__e just part of everything. And that__ exactly what__l happen to you, I swear to you, I promise on my honor. You__l drift apart, it__ true, but you__l be out in the open, part of everything alive again.

Tirelessly they flew on and on, and tirelessly she kept pace. She felt a fierce joy possessing her, that she could command these immortal presences. And she rejoiced in her blood and flesh, in the rough pine bark she felt next to her skin, in the beat of her heart and the life of all her senses, and in the hunger she was feeling now, and in the presence of her sweet-voiced bluethroat dæmon, and in the earth below her and the lives of every creature, plant and animal both; and she delighted in being of the same substance as them, and in knowing that when she died her flesh would nourish other lives as they had nourished her.

It was such a strange tormenting feeling when your daemon was pulling at the link between you; part physical pain deep in the chest, part intense sadness and love. Everyone tested it when they were growing up: seeing how far they could pull apart, coming back with intense relief.

Her upbringing had given her an independence of mind that made her more like a girl of today than one of her own time - which was why she had walked out, and why she was not daunted by the prospect of being alone.

Occasionally they would hear a harsh croak or a splash as some amphibian was disturbed, but the only creature they saw was a toad as big as Will's foot, which could only flop in a pain-filled sideways heave as if it were horribly injured. It lay across the path, trying to move out of the way and looking at them as if it knew they meant to hurt it.'It would be merciful to kill it,' said Tialys.'How do you know?' said Lyra. 'It might still like being alive, in spite of everything.''If we killed it, we'd be taking it with us,' said Will. 'It wants to stay here. I've killed enough living things. Even a filthy stagnant pool might be better than being dead.''But if it's in pain?' said Tialys.'If it could tell us, we'd know. But since it can't, I'm not going to kill it. That would be considering our feelings rather than the toad's.'They moved on.

All good things pass away.

I was connected to God like that, and because he was there, I was connected to the whole of his creation.

You are so young, Lyra, too young to understand this, but I shall tell you anyway and you'll understand it later: men pass in front of our eyes like butterflies, creatures of a brief season. We love them; they are brave, proud, beautiful, clever; and they die almost at once. They die so soon that our hearts are continually racked with pain. We bear their children, who are witches if they are female, human if not; and then in the blink of an eye they are gone, felled, slain, lost. Our sons, too. When a little boy is growing, he thinks he is immortal. His mother knows he isn't. Each time becomes more painful, until finally your heart is broken. Perhaps that is when Yambe-Akka comes for you. She is older than the tundra. Perhaps, for her, witches' lives are as brief as men's are to us.

And Pantalaimon didn't ask why, because he knew; and he didn't ask whether Lyra loved Roger more than him, because he knew the true answer to that, too. And he knew that if he spoke, she wouldn't be able to resist; so the dæmon held himself quiet so as not to distress the human who was abandoning him, and now they were both pretending that it wouldn't hurt, it wouldn't be long before they were together again, it was all for the best. But Will knew that the little girl was tearing her heart out of her breast.

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. They are what it is made for. But sometimes a tool may have other uses that you don't know. Sometimes in doing what you intend, you also do what the knife intends, without knowing.

Just as she was unaware of the hidden currents of politics running below the surface of College affairs, so the Scholars, for their part, would have been unable to see the rich seething stew of alliances and enmities and feuds and treaties which was a child__ life in Oxford. Children playing together: how pleasant to see! What could be more innocent and charming?

she delighted in being of the same substance as them, and in knowing that when she died her flesh would nourish other lives as they had nourished her.

Lyra marveled at the effect hope could have.

Fritz had to stop himself from interrupting when Karl spoke about the difficulty of working. Stories are just as hard as clocks to put together, and they can go wrong just as easily--as we shall soon see with Fritz's own story in a page or two. Still, Fritz was an optimist, and Karl was a pessimist, and that makes all the difference in the world.

There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children__ book. In adult literary fiction, stories are there on sufferance. Other things are felt to be more important: technique, style, literary knowingness_ The present-day would-be George Eliots take up their stories as if with a pair of tongs. They__e embarrassed by them. If they could write novels without stories in them, they would. Sometimes they do. We need stories so much that we__e even willing to read bad books to get them, if the good books won__ supply them. We all need stories, but children are more frank about it.

Finally, I__ say to anyone who wants to tell these tales, don__ be afraid to be superstitious. If you have a lucky pen, use it. If you speak with more force and wit when wearing one red sock and one blue one, dress like that. When I__ at work I__ highly superstitious. My own superstition has to do with the voice in which the story comes out. I believe that every story is attended by its own sprite, whose voice we embody when we tell the tale, and that we tell it more successfully if we approach the sprite with a certain degree of respect and courtesy. These sprites are both old and young, male and female, sentimental and cynical, sceptical and credulous, and so on, and what__ more, they__e completely amoral: like the air-spirits who helped Strong Hans escape from the cave, the story-sprites are willing to serve whoever has the ring, whoever is telling the tale. To the accusation that this is nonsense, that all you need to tell a story is a human imagination, I reply, __f course, and this is the way my imagination works.