Home > Work > The Subtle Knife (His Dark Materials, #2)
21 " there are few natural philosophers as frustrated as astronomers in a fog. "
― Philip Pullman , The Subtle Knife (His Dark Materials, #2)
22 " What is he? A friend or an enemy? The alethiometer answered: He is a murderer. "
23 " Just sort of relax your mind and say yes, it does hurt, I know. "
24 " The temperature had disturbed the insects, and a cloud of midges made every outline hazy. "
25 " That is what the Church does, and every church is the same: control, destroy, obliterate every good feeling. So if a war comes, and the Church is on one side of it, we must be on the other, no matter what strange allies we find ourselves bound to. "
26 " Just sort of relax your mind and say yes, it does hurt, I know. Don’t try and shut it out. "
27 " The Subtle Knife is the second part of the trilogy that began with The Golden Compass. That first book was set in a world like ours, but different. This book begins in our own world. "
28 " Anything that was associated with human workmanship and human thought was surrounded by Shadows.… "
29 " nor that she saw them as human-formed only because her eyes expected to. If she were to perceive their true form, they would seem more like architecture than organism, like huge structures composed of intelligence and feeling. "
30 " whatever humanness he had left felt the strangest of pleasures: that of offering eager obedience to a stronger power that was wholly right. "
31 " Can you imagine my astonishment, in turn, at learning that part of my own nature was female, and bird-formed, and beautiful? "
32 " Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit. "
33 " I know whom we must fight...it is the Church. For all its history, it's tried to suppress and control every natural impulse.That is what the Church does, and every church is the same: control, destroy, obliterate every good feeling. "
34 " It’s like having to make a choice: a blessing or a curse. The one thing you can’t do is choose neither. "
35 " Then she was pressing her little proud broken self against his face, as close as she could get, and then they died. "
36 " The fact was that where Will is concerned, she was developing a new kind of sense, as if he were simply more in focus than anyone she'd known before. Everything about him was clear and close and immediate. "
37 " Just sort of relax your mind and say yes, it does hurt, I know. Don't try and shut it out. "
38 " It does not make sense. It cannot exist. It's impossible, and if it isn't impossible, it's irrelevant, and if it isn't either of those things, it's embarrassing. "
39 " He dared to do what men and women don't even dare to think. And look what he's done already: he's torn open the sky, he's opened the way to another world. Who else has ever done that? Who else could think of it? "
40 " I found folly everywhere, but there were grains of wisdom in every stream of it. "