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

They turn up frequently in auctions, in book-dealers’ catalogues, and the like. Usually their significance remains mysterious;

and having a minute ago nearly gone mad with fear, she was now suffused with a deep slow ecstasy at being one with her body and the earth and everything that was matter.

“Perhaps we don’t mean the same thing by choice, Mr Scoresby. Witches own nothing, so we’re not interested in preserving value or making profits, and as for the choice between one thing and another, when you live for many hundreds of years you know that every opportunity will come again. We have different needs.

His part was simply to listen. His eyes were locked on hers, and he was paying profound attention; there was no need to respond.

but it wasn’t only imagination the nurse lacked, it was curiosity as well.

were filled with anxiety and with sweetness in equal measure, so that he struggled to wake up and yet longed for sleep again.

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.

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.