His Dark Materials: The Complete Collection: now a major BBC TV series

Someone will appear to guide you: the night is full of angels.

People here cannot conceive of worlds where dæmons are a silent voice in the mind and no more. Can you imagine my astonishment, in turn, at learning that part of my own nature was female, and bird-formed, and beautiful?

She sipped her chocolatl, which was thin and weak; how like these tedious priests, she thought, to take their self-righteous abstinence out on their visitors too.

an ecstatic straining towards oblivion.

When you choose one way out of many, all the ways you don’t take are snuffed out like candles, as if they’d never existed. At the moment all Will’s choices existed at once. But to keep them all in existence meant doing nothing.

and she would not do him the treachery of looking away, for if he looked at her he must see her shining eyes and their love and belief, not a face hidden in cowardice or a shoulder fearfully turned away.

Lyra knew that Pantalaimon’s impulse was to reach out and cuddle the little half-child, to lick him and gentle him and warm him as his own dæmon would have done; but the great taboo prevented that, of course.

Will realized slowly and unwillingly that those enemies of his mother’s were not in the world out there, but in her mind. That made them no less real, no less frightening and dangerous; it just meant he had to protect her even more carefully.

smiling happily, because Yambe-Akka was merry and light-hearted and her visits were gifts of joy.