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Quotations: TAS

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Quotations: The Amber Spyglass

A listing of popular quotations from The Amber Spyglass, written by Philip Pullman

Balthamos, Chapter two:

The Authority, God, the Creator, the Lord, Yahweh, El, Adonai, the King, the Father, the Almighty - those were all names he gave himself. He was an angel like ourselves - the first angel, true, the most powerful, but he was formed of Dust as we are and Dust is only a name for what happens when matter begins to understand itself. 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.

Lyra, Chapter seven:

because he's Will

Lyra, Chapter thirteen:

How lucky Will was that she was awake now to look after him! He was truly fearless, and she admired that beyond measure; but he wasn't good at lying and betraying and cheating, which all came to her as naturally as breathing. When she thought of that she felt warm and virtuous, because she did it for Will, never for herself.

Chevalier Tialys, Chapter twenty-three:

This will undo everything. It's the greatest blow you could stirike. The Authority will be powerless after this.

John Parry, Chapter twenty-six:

...we have to build the Republic of Heaven where we are, because for us there is no elsewhere.

Lord Asriel, Chapter twenty-eight:

Isn't it something to bring a child like that into the world? You'd think it was enough to go alone to the king of the armoured bears and trick his kingdom out of his paws - but to go down into the world of the dead and calmly let them all out! And that boy; I want to meet that boy; I want to shake his hand. Did we know what we were taking on when we started this rebellion? No. But did [i]they[/i] know - the Authority and his Regent, this Metatron - did they know what they were taking on when my daughter go involved?

Lee Scoresby, Chapter twenty-nine:

Lyra, gal, it won't be long now. When you see that old bear, you tell him Lee went out fighting. And when the battle's over, there'll be all the time in the world to drift along the wind and find the atoms that used to be Hester, and my mother in the sagelands, and my sweethearts - all my sweethearts....Lyra, child, you rest when this is done, you hear? Life is good, and death is over...

Metatron, Chapter thirty:

Corruption and envy and lust for power. Cruelty and coldness. A vicious, probing curiosity. Pure, poisonous, toxic malice. 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. You have tortured and killed without regret or hesitation; you have betrayed and intrigued and gloried in your treachery. You are a cesspit of moral filth.

Will Parry, Chapter thirty-one:

You said I was a warrior. You told me that was my nature, and I shouldn't argue with it. Father, you were wrong. I fought because I had to. I can't choose my nature, but I can choose what I do. And I [i]will[/i] choose, because now I'm free.

Mrs. Coulter, Chapter thirty-one:

I told him I was going to betray you, and Lyra, and he believed me because I was corrupt and full of wickedness; he looked so deep I felt like he'd seen the truth.

Mrs. Coulter, Chapter thirty-one:

But I love Lyra, where did all this love come from? I don't know; it came to me like a thief in the night, and now I love her so much my heart is bursting with it.

Ghost, Chapter thirty-two:

Tell them stories.

Mary Malone, Chapter thirty-three:

The Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake, that's all.

Mary Malone, Chapter thirty-three:

Being in love was like China: you knew it was there, and no doubt it was very interesting, and some people went there, but I never would. I'd spend all my life without ever going to China, but it wouldn't matter, because there was all the rest of the world to visit.

Mary Malone, Chapter thirty-three:

[...]I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that wer outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are. All we can say is that this is a good deed, because it helps someone, or that's an evil one, because it hurts them. People are too complicated to have simple labels.

Mary Malone, Chapter thirty-four:

There is now!

Mary Malone, Chapter thirty-six:

Something happened today, or yesterday if it's after midnight. [...]Something tiny but crucial...If you wanted to divert a mighty river into a different course, and all you had was a single pebble, you could do it, as long as you put the pebble in the right place to send the first trickle of water [i]that[/i] way instead of [/i]this[/i]. Something like that happened yesterday. I don't know what it was. They saw each other differently, or something...Until then, they hadn't felt like that, but suddenly they did. And then the Dust was attracted to them, very powerfully, and it stopped flowing the other way.

Serafina Pekkala, Chapter thirty-six:

'I was flying high,' she explained, 'looking for a landfall, and I met an angel: a female angel. She was very strange; she was old and young together,' she went on, forgetting that that was how she herself appeared to Mary. 'Her name was Xaphania. She told me many things... She said that all the history of human life has been a struggle between wisdom and stupidity. She and the rebel angels, the followers of wisdom, have always tried to open minds; the Authority and his churches have always tried to keep them closed. She gave me many examples from my world.'

Xaphania, Chapter thirty-seven:

Dust is not a constant. There's not a fixed quantity that has always been the same. Conscious beings make Dust - they renew it all the time, by thinking and feeling and reflecting, by gaining wisdom and passing it on.

Chapter thirty-eight:

We have to be all those difficult things like cheerful and kind and curious and patient, and we've got to study and thing and work hard, all of us, in all our different worlds, and then we'll build...' [...] 'And then what?' said her dæmon sleepily. 'Build what?' 'The Republic of Heaven,' said Lyra.