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For That Reason You Can't Write With Music Playing, And Anyone Who Says He Can Is Either Writing Badly, Or Not Listening To The Music, Or Lying. You Need To Hear What You're Writing, And For That You Need Silence
-Philip Pullman
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For That Reason You

Philip Pullman
For That Reason You Can't Write With Music Playing, And Anyone Who Says He Can Is Either Writing Badly, Or Not Listening To The Music, Or Lying. You Need To Hear What You're Writing, And For That You Need Silence
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Lying
Writing
Silence
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If We All Gave All Our Goods To The Poor, The Church Would Fall Apart. If We All Hated Our Father And Mother, As Jesus Told Us To, There'd Be An End Of The Church's Emphasis On The Family As Being The One Important Thing Holding The Whole Society Together. There Are All Sorts Of Ways In Which The Church's Teachings Contradict Directly What Jesus Says In The Gospel.
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D'you Know How Embarrassing It Is To Mention Good And Evil In A Scientific Laboratory? Have You Any Idea? One Of The Reasons I Became A Scientist Was Not To Have To Think About That Kind Of Thing.
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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.
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I Think It's Perfectly Possible To Explain How The Universe Came About Without Bringing God Into It, But I Don't Know Everything, And There May Well Be A God Somewhere, Hiding Away. Actually, If He Is Keeping Out Of Sight, It's Because He's Ashamed Of His Followers And All The Cruelty And Ignorance They're Responsible For Promoting In His Name. If I Were Him, I'd Want Nothing To Do With Them.
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The Christian Religion Is A Very Powerful And Convincing Mistake.
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I Had Passed Through The Entire British Education System Studying Literature, Culminating In Three Years Of Reading English At Oxford, And They'd Never Told Me About Something As Basic As The Importance Of Point Of View In Fiction!
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Just Sort Of Relax Your Mind And Say Yes, It Does Hurt, I Know. Don't Try And Shut It Out.
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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 That Moment All Will's Choices Existed At Once. But To Keep Them All In Existence Meant Doing Nothing. He Had To Choose, After All.
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I Don't Know Where My Ideas Come From, But I Know Where They Come To. They Come To My Desk, And If I'm Not There, They Go Away Again.
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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.
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After Nourishment, Shelter And Companionship, Stories Are The Thing We Need Most In The World.
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The First Ghost To Leave The World Of The Dead Was Roger. He Took A Step Forward, And Turned To Look Back At Lyra, And Laughed In Surprise As He Found Himself Turning Into The Night, The Starlight, The Air. . .and Then He Was Gone, Leaving Behind Such A Vivid Little Burst Of Happiness.
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People Should Decide On The Books' Meanings For Themselves. They'll Find A Story That Attacks Such Things As Cruelty, Oppression, Intolerance, Unkindness, Narrow-mindedness, And Celebrates Love, Kindness, Open-mindedness, Tolerance, Curiosity, Human Intelligence.
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What I Couldn't Help Noticing Was That I Learned More About The Novel In A Morning By Trying To Write A Page Of One Than I'd Learned In Seven Years Or So Of Trying To Write Criticism
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I'm Just Trying To Wake Up - I'm So Afraid Of Sleeping All My Life And Then Dying - I Want To Wake Up First. I Wouldn't Care If It Was Just For An Hour, As Long As I Was Properly Alive And Awake.
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We Shouldn't Live As If [other Worlds] Mattered More Than This Life In This World, Because Where We Are Is Always The Most Important Place.
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For That Reason You Can't Write With Music Playing, And Anyone Who Says He Can Is Either Writing Badly, Or Not Listening To The Music, Or Lying. You Need To Hear What You're Writing, And For That You Need Silence
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There’s Been Terrible Things We Seen, En’t There? And More A Coming, More’n Likely. So I Think I’d Rather Not Know What’s In The Future. I’ll Stick To The Present.
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Writing
Doctors
That's The Duty Of The Old, To Be Anxious On Behalf Of The Young. And The Duty Of The Young Is To Scorn The Anxiety Of The Old.
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Tell Them Stories. They Need The Truth You Must Tell Them True Stories, And Everything Will Be Well, Just Tell Them Stories.
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Then She Was Pressing Her Little Proud Broken Self Against His Face, As Close As She Could Get, And Then They Died.
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Broken
Proud
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Cutting
Ordinary
Doe
It’s Like Having To Make A Choice: A Blessing Or A Curse. The One Thing You Can’t Do Is Choose Neither.
Blessing
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Curse
She Wondered Whether There Would Ever Come An Hour In Her Life When She Didn't Think Of Him -- Didn't Speak To Him In Her Head, Didn't Relive Every Moment They'd Been Together, Didn't Long For His Voice And His Hands And His Love. She Had Never Dreamed Of What It Would Feel Like To Love Someone So Much; Of All The Things That Had Astonished Her In Her Adventures, That Was What Astonished Her The Most. She Thought The Tenderness It Left In Her Heart Was Like A Bruise That Would Never Go Away, But She Would Cherish It Forever.
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Adventure
Thinking
One Moment Several Things Are Possible, The Next Moment Only One Happens, And The Rest Don't Exist. Except That Other Worlds Have Sprung Into Being, On Which The Did Happen.
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Tolkien Seems To Me Reactionary, Conservative, Fearful Of A Modern World. Fearful Of Anything That Isn't Sanctioned By The Passage Of Long Eons Of Time. I Think What I'm Doing In His Dark Materials Is Politically The Reverse Of That.
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Long
Read Like A Butterfly, Write Like A Bee.
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Tell Him, We Are Not Devils But We Have Friends Who Are.
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People Are Too Complicated To Have Simple Labels.
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The Lord Of The Rings' Is Fundamentally An Infantile Work. Tolkien Is Not Interested In The Way Grownup, Adult Human Beings Interact With Each Other. He's Interested In Maps And Plans And Languages And Codes.
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Do You Think I Could Bear To Live On After You Died? Oh, Lyra, I'd Follow You Down To The World Of The Dead Without Thinking Twice About It, Just Like You Followed Roger; And That Would Be Two Lives Gone For Nothing, My Life Wasted Like Yours. No, We Should Spend Our Whole Lifetimes Together, Good Long Busy Lives, And If We Can't Spend Them Together, We... We'll Have To Spend Them Apart.
Thinking
Two
Long
I've Been Surprised By How Little Criticism I've Got. Harry Potter's Been Taking All The Flak. I'm A Great Fan Of J.k. Rowling, But The People - Mainly From America's Bible Belt - Who Complain That Harry Potter Promotes Satanism Or Witchcraft Obviously Haven't Got Enough In Their Lives. Meanwhile, I've Been Flying Under The Radar, Saying Things That Are Far More Subversive Than Anything Poor Old Harry Has Said. My Books Are About Killing God.
Book
America
People
There Is Time, And There Is Beyond Time. History Belongs To Time, But Truth Belongs To What Is Beyond Time. In Writing Of Things As They Should Have Been, You Are Letting Truth Into History. You Are The Word Of God.
Writing
Should Have
Truth Is
I Practiced On The Greatest Model Of Storytelling We've Got, Which Is "the Iliad" And "the Odyssey." I Told Those Stories Many, Many Times.
Stories
Odyssey
Iliad
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.
Technology
Knives
Knowing
Her Last Conscious Thought Was Disgust At Life; Her Senses Had Lied To Her. The World Was Not Made Of Energy And Delight But Of Foulness, Betrayal, And Lassitude. Living Was Hateful, And Death Was No Better, And From End To End Of The Universe This Was The First And Last And Only Truth.
Betrayal
Energy
Delight
There Are Some Themes, Some Subjects, Too Large For Adult Fiction; They Can Only Be Dealt With Adequately In A Children's Book.
Children
Book
Adults
And Then What?" Said Her Daemon Sleepily. "build What?" "the Republic Of Heaven," Said Lyra.
Heaven
Republic
Said
We Are All Subject To The Fates. But We Must All Act As If We Are Not, Or Die Of Despair...death Will Sweep Through All The Worlds; It Will Be The Triumph Of Despair, Forever. The Universes Will All Become Nothing More Than Interlocking Machines, Blind And Empty Of Thought, Feeling, Life...
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Forever
Feelings
For A Long Time I Thought I Was A Poet, But That's A High Title To Claim.
Long
Titles
Boots
You Don't Read It In The Sense Of Reading A Message; It Doesn't Work Like That. What's Happening Is That The Shadows Are Responding To The Attention You Pay Them.
Reading
Shadow
Attention
I Don't Expect Christians To See God As A Metaphor, But That's What He Is. Perhaps It Might Be Clearer To Call Him A Character In Fiction, And A Very Interesting One Too: One Of The Greatest And Most Complex Villains Of All - Savage, Petty, Boastful And Jealous, And Yet Capable Of Moments Of Tenderness And Extremes Of Arbitrary Affection - For David, For Example. But He's Not Real, Any More Than Hamlet Or Mr Pickwick Are Real. They Are Real In The Context Of Their Stories, But You Won't Find Them In The Phone Book.
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Real
Book
Teachers Often Make The Mistake Of Thinking They're The Boss Of The Class; They're Not. The Boss Of The Class Is Sitting Down There Somewhere.
Teacher
Mistake
Thinking
Seems To Me-" Lee Said, Feeling For The Words, "seems To Me The Place You Fight Cruelty Is Where You Find It, And The Place You Give Help Is Where You See It Needed.
Fighting
Giving
Feelings
I Told Him I Was Going To Betray You, And Betray Lyra, And He Believed Me Because I Was Corrupt And Full Of Wickedness; He Looked So Deep I Felt Sure He'd See The Truth. But I Lied Too Well. I Was Lying With Every Nerve And Fiber And Everything I'd Ever Done...i Wanted Him To Find No Good In Me, And He Didn't. There Is None.
Truth
Lying
Nerves
What I Do Say Is That I Can Write Verse, And That The Writing Of Verse In Strict Form Is The Best Possible Training For Writing Good Prose
Writing
Training
Form
Just Finished 'secrecy' - Truly Enthralling Both As A Love Story And As A Tale Of Suspense - But Much More Than Both.
Suspense
Stories
Love Story
Religion Begins In Story. Yes, It Does, Because Religion Is An Attempt To Make Sense Of What Is Incomprehensible To Us, What Is Inexplicable, What Is Awe-inspiring, What Is Frightening, What Moves Us To Great Wonder, And So On. That Is The Religious Impulse, And It Is Part Of Our Psychological Makeup -- Of Everyone's Psychological Makeup.
Religious
Moving
Makeup
No,' He Said, 'memory's A Poor Thing To Have. It's Your Own Real Hair And Mouth And Arms And Eyes And Hands I Want. I Didn't Know I Could Ever Love Anything So Much.
Memories
Real
Eye
Literary Modernism Kind Of Grew Out Of A Sense That, “oh My God! I’m Telling A Story! Oh, That Can’t Be The Case, Because I’m A Clever Person. I’m A Literary Person! What Am I Going To Do To Distinguish Myself? I Know! I’ll Write Ulysses.”
Clever
Writing
Stories
Lonely? I Don't Know. They Tell Me This Is Cold. I Don't Know What Cold Is, Because I Don't Freeze. So I Don't Know What Lonely Means Either. Bears Are Made To Be Solitary.
Lonely
Mean
Bears
All Things From The North Are Devilish.
All Things
Devilish
I Will Love You For Ever, Whatever Happens. Till I Die And After I Die, And When I Find My Way Out Of The Land Of The Dead I'll Drift About Forever, All My Atoms, Till I Find You Again.
Love You
Land
Forever
And Barely Ten Minutes Later The Soft Sound Of Wingbeats Came To Their Ears, And Balthamos Stood Up Eagerly. The Next Moment, The Two Angels Were Embracing, And Will, Gazing Into The Flames, Saw Their Mutual Affection. More Than Affection: They Loved Each Other With A Passion.
Love
Angel
Passion
She Was Riding A Bear! And The Aurora Was Swaying Above Them In Golden Arcs And Loops, And All Around Was The Bitter Arctic Cold And The Immense Silence Of The North.
Silence
Riding
Aurora
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.
Love
Travel
Knowing
I'm With The Grimms On This: Stories For Young And Old. You Can't Characterize Them Any Better Than That.
Stories
Grimm
Young
I Look At The State Of The American Politics And I Scratch My Head In Wonder. How Can The Republican Party, Any Party, Have Fallen Into To Such A State Of Self-destructiveness - Self-destructive Stupidity? How Is It Possible? I Don't Know. It's An Absolute Mystery To Me.
Party
Stupidity
Mystery
I Got A Book Token For Christmas And Exchanged It For A Book Called A History Of Art, And That Book (which I Still Have-battered And Falling To Pieces) Became More Precious To Me Than Any Bible.
Art
Book
Fall
Corruption And Envy And Lust For Power. Cruelty And Coldness. A Vicious Probing Curiousity. Pure, Poisonous, Toxic Malice. You Have Never From Your Earliest Years Shown A Shred Of Compassion For 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 Cess-pit Of Moral Filth.
Kindness
Regret
Compassion
My Real Purpose In Telling Middle-school Students Stories Was To Practice Telling Stories. And I Practiced On The Greatest Model Of Storytelling We've Got, Which Is "the Iliad" And "the Odyssey." I Told Those Stories Many, Many Times. And The Way I Would Justify It To The Head Teacher If He Came In Or To Any Parents Who Complained Was, Look, I'm Telling These Great Stories Because They're Part Of Our Cultural Heritage. I Did Believe That.
Teacher
Real
Believe
He's [jesus] The Most Fascinating Character In History, Really - The Character Who's Made More Difference To The World Than Anyone Since Him. I Daresay That Muslims Would Say Muhammad Was That Character, But I Think Jesus Had A Sort Of 600-year Start On Him.
Jesus
Character
Thinking
If I'm Reading Something I Happen To Know And Gets It Wrong, I Just Don't Trust The Book Any More. What I Ask Of A Novel I'm Reading Is That It Should Know A Fraction More About The Things I Know Than I Do. When I'm Writing...i Ask Myself: Would I Be Convinced By This If I Read It? If I Knocked Against This Bit Of Scenery, Would It Feel Solid?
Book
Reading
Writing
There Are Some Who Live By Every Rule And Cling Tightly To Their Rectitude Because They Fear Being Swept Away By A Tempest Of Passion, And There Are Others Who Cling To The Rules Because They Fear That There Is No Passion There At All, And That If They Let Go They Would Simply Remain Where They Are, Foolish And Unmoved; And They Could Bear That Least Of All. Living A Life Of Iron Control Lets Them Pretend To Themselves That Only By The Mightiest Effort Of Will Can They Hold Great Passions At Bay.
Letting Go
Passion
Iron
If A Coin Comes Down Heads, That Means That The Possibility Of Its Coming Down Tails Has Collapsed. Until That Moment The Two Possibilities Were Equal. But On Another World, It Does Come Down Tails. And When That Happens, The Two Worlds Split Apart.
Mean
Two
Doe
It's Only Through Honesty And Courage That Science Can Work At All. The Ptolemaic Understanding Of The Solar System Was Undermined And Corrected By The Constant Pressure Of More And More Honest Reporting.
Honesty
Hard Work
Science
Sticks And Stones, I'll Break Yer Bones, But Names Ain't Worth A Quarrel.
Names
Stones
Sticks
A Professional Writer Is Someone Who Writes Just As Well When They're Not Inspired As When They Are.
Writing
Inspired
Wells
You Cannot Change What You Are, Only What You Do.
Change
Being Yourself
Life Changing
The Justice Of It Seems To Children Correct And Right - I Mean, We Laugh At It! We Underestimate Children's Ability To Know What Is A Story And What Isn't.
Children
Mean
Justice
My Mother Married Again After My Father's Death - Another Royal Air Force Officer, And A Very Different Kind Of Man. We Went To Australia When I Was Eight Or Nine. We Lived There For A Couple Of Years, And Then Came Back And Lived In North Wales For The Whole Of My Teenage Years... I Learned How To Write Poems Quite A Lot. I Just Had A Good Time Reading And Reading And Reading. So That's Where I Did Most Of My Growing Up.
Mother
Growing Up
Couple
Men Pass In Front Of Our Eyes Like Butterflies, Creatures Of A Brief Season. We Love Them; They Are Brave, Proud, Beautiful, And Clever.
Beautiful
Clever
Butterfly
On A Cold, Fretful Afternoon In Early October, 1872, A Hansom Cab Drew Up Outside The Offices Of Lockhart And Selby, Shipping Agents, In The Financial Heart Of London, And A Young Girl Got Out And Paid The Driver. She Was A Person Of Sixteen Or So--alone, And Uncommonly Pretty. She Was Slender And Pale, And Dressed In Mourning, With A Black Bonnet Under Which She Tucked Back A Straying Twist Of Blond Hair That The Wind Had Teased Loose. She Had Unusually Dark Brown Eyes For One So Fair. Her Name Was Sally Lockhart; And Within Fifteen Minutes, She Was Going To Kill A Man.
Girl
Eye
Heart
Half A Dozen Brats Turned With Expressions Of Derision, And Lyra Threw Her Cigarette Down, Recognizing The Cue For A Fight. Everyone's Daemon Instantly Became Warlike: Each Child Was Accompanied By Fangs, Or Claws, Or Bristling Fur, And Pantalaimon, Contemptuous Of The Limited Imaginations Of These Gyptian Daemons, Became A Dragon The Size Of A Deer Hound.
Children
Fighting
Dragons
I'll Be Looking For You, Will, Every Moment, Every Single Moment. And When We Do Find Each Other Again, We'll Cling Together So Tight That Nothing And No One'll Ever Tear Us Apart. Every Atom Of Me And Every Atom Of You... We'll Live In Birds And Flowers And Dragonflies And Pine Trees And In Clouds And In Those Little Specks Of Light You See Floating In Sunbeams... And When They Use Our Atoms To Make New Lives, They Wont' Just Be Able To Take One, They'll Have To Take Two, One Of You And One Of Me, We'll Be Joined So Tight.
Flower
Clouds
Light
We Measure The Value Of A Civilized Society By The Number Of #‎ Libraries It Opens, Not The Number It Closes Down.
Numbers
Library
Civilized Society
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.
Focus
Facts
Kind
The Range Of Individuality In Children Is Infinite, But Every Class Of Children Seemed To Have The Same Groups. And There Was A Chief Girl And A Chief Boy - A Girl That All The Other Girls Of That Age Looked Up To And Imitated And A Boy That All The Boys Looked Up To And Imitated. I Realized That If I Got Them On My Side And Exclusively Taught Them For A Couple Of Weeks, Maybe For The First Full Term, Then I Wouldn't Have Any Trouble. Teachers Often Make The Mistake Of Thinking They're The Boss Of The Class; They're Not. The Boss Of The Class Is Sitting Down There Somewhere.
Girl
Teacher
Children
There Is Another Consequence Of Any Belief In A Single God, And That Is That It Is A Very Good Excuse For People To Behave Very Badly.
People
Belief
Excuse
This Is The Value For Me Of Writing Books That Children Read. Children Aren't Interested In Your Appalling Self-consciousness. They Want To Know What Happens Next. They Force You To Tell A Story.
Children
Book
Writing
All The Stories Of The Bible That I Know Came To Me First From My Grandfather's Lips... He Would See Stories In Everything. He Told Stories Very Easily And Very Generously, So I Loved Him For That. He Was A Simple Man, A Victorian; He Was Born In 1890-something. He Saw No Reason And Had Never Seen Any Reason To Question His Christian Faith. His Faith Was Strong And Simple And That's It. And I, Like His Other Grandchildren And The Children In His Parish, Sheltered Underneath It.
Christian
Strong
Children
Symbols And Emblems Were Everywhere. Buildings And Pictures Were Designed To Be Read Like Books. Everything Stood For Something Else; If You Had The Right Dictionary, You Could Read Nature Itself. It Was Hardly Surprising To Find Philosophers Using The Symbolism Of Their Time To Interpret Knowledge That Came From A Mysterious Source.
Book
Symbolism
Philosopher
Looking At Them Now, Thought Jim, You'd Never Believe They Weren't In Love With Each Other, And Not With A Hopeless, Doomed Obsession Like Poor Isabel Meredith. This Was What Love Ought To Be Like: Playful And Passionate And Teasing, And Dangerous, Too, With Sharp Intelligence In It.
Believe
Passionate
Hopeless
You'll Drift Apart, It's True, But You'll Be Out In The Open, Part Of Everything Alive Again.
Alive
So Lyra And Her Daemon Turned Away From The World They Were Born In, And Looked Toward The Sun, And Walked Into The Sky.
Sky
World
Sun
I Thought Physics Could Be Done To The Glory Of God, Till I Saw There Wasn’t Any God At All And That Physics Was More Interesting Anyway. The Christian Religion Is A Very Powerful And Convincing Mistake, That’s All.
Christian
Powerful
Mistake
When It Comes To Telling Children Stories, They Don’t Need Simple Language. They Need Beautiful Language.
Beautiful
Children
Simple
It's Not My Business To Remedy Deaths! It's My Business To Tell Stories. Lyra And The Other Heroines Didn't Come With Placards Saying, "make This A Feminist Story!" I'm Glad People Enjoy Seeing A Female Protagonist In A Big Adventure Story, But I Didn't Do It For Political Reasons.
Adventure
People
Feminist
What Work Do I Have To Do Then?" Said Will, But Went On At Once, "no, On Second Thought, Don't Tell Me. I Shall Decide What I Do. If You Say My Work Is Fighting, Or Healing, Or Exploring, Or Whatever You Might Say, I'll Always Be Thinking About It. And If I Do End Up Doing That, I'll Be Resentful Because It'll Feel As If I Didn't Have A Choice, And If I Don't Do It, I'll Feel Guilty Because I Should. Whatever I Do, I Will Choose It, No One Else.
Healing
Fighting
Thinking
Everyone, From The Mother Superior To The Priests To My Parents--they Were So Upset And Reproachful...i Felt As If Something They All Passionately Believed In Depended On Me Carrying On With Something I Didn't.
Mother
Parent
Upset
As Jane Austen Might Have Put It: It Is A Truth Universally Acknowledged That Young Protagonists In Search Of Adventure Must Ditch Their Parents.
Writing
Adventure
Parent
The State Of Mind Which I Put Myself When I Tell A Story Is One In Which Superstition Flourishes Very Easily. And I Welcome That Because It Helps Me.
Mind
Stories
Superstitions
Because The Great Thing About Fairy Tales And Folk Tales Is That There Is No Authentic Text. It's Not Like The Text Of Paradise Lost Or James Joyce's Ulysses, And You Have To Adhere To That Exact Text.
Paradise
Fairy Tale
Ulysses
Maybe Sometimes We Don't Do The Right Thing Because The Wrong Thing Looks More Dangerous, And We Don't Want To Look Scared, So We Go And Do The Wrong Thing Just Because It's Dangerous. We're More Concerned With Not Looking Scared Than With Judging Right.
Fear
Judging
Looks
And Then Serafina Understood Something For Which The Witches Had No Word: It Was The Idea Of Pilgrimage. She Understood Why These Beings Would Wait For Thousands Of Years And Travel Vast Distances In Order To Be Close To Something Important, And How They Would Feel Differently For The Rest Of Time, Having Been Briefly In Its Presence. That Was How These Creatures Looked Now, These Beautiful Pilgrims Of Rarefied Light, Standing Around The Girl With The Dirty-face And The Tartan Skirt And The Boy With The Wounded Hand Who Was Frowning In His Sleep.
Beautiful
Girl
Distance
Once Upon A Time' Lasts Forever.
Forever
Once Upon A Time
Lasts
Lyra Learns To Her Great Cost That Fantasy Isn’t Enough. She Has Been Lying All Her Life, Telling Stories To People, Making Up Fantasies, And Suddenly She Comes To A Point Where That’s Not Enough. All She Can Do Is Tell The Truth. She Tells The Truth About Her Childhood, About The Experiences She Had In Oxford, And That Is What Saves Her. True Experience, Not Fantasy - Reality, Not Lies - Is What Saves Us In The End.
Lying
Reality
Oxford
She Found Out That Having Something To Do Prevented You From Feeling Seasick, And That Even A Job Like Scrubbing A Deck Could Be Satisfying, If It Was Done In A Seamanlike Way. She Was Very Taken With This Notion, And Later On She Folded The Blankets On Her Bunk In A Seamanlike Way, And Put Her Possessions In The Closet In A Seamanlike Way, And Used 'stow' Instead Of 'tidy' For The Process Of Doing So. After Two Days At Sea, Lyra Decided That This Was The Life For Her.
Inspirational
Funny
Jobs
Long Before Writing, People Were Telling Each Other Stories And The Audiobook Goes All The Way Back To That Tradition.
Writing
Long
People
I'm Perfectly Happy About Being Superstitious And Atheistic.
Atheistic
Superstitious
Being A Practiced Liar Doesn't Mean You Have A Powerful Imagination. Many Good Liars Have No Imagination At All; It's That Which Gives Their Lies Such Wide-eyed Conviction.
Powerful
Liars
Lying
There's A Hunger For Stories In All Of Us, Adults Too. We Need Stories So Much That We're Even Willing To Read Bad Books To Get Them, If The Good Books Won't Supply Them.
Book
Adults
Needs
If You Can't Think Of What To Write, Tough Luck; Write Anyway. If You Can Think Of Lots More When You've Finished The Three Pages, Don't Write It; It'll Be That Much Easier To Get Going Next Day.
Writing
Thinking
Next Day
We Need To Ensure That Children Are Not Forced To Waste Their Time On Barren Rubbish.
Children
Needs
Waste
And Among Academicians, And Among Spirits. I Found Folly Everywhere, But There Were Grains Of Wisdom In Every Stream Of It. No Doubt There Was Much More Wisdom That I Failed To Recognize. Life Is Hard, Mr. Scoresby, But We Cling To It All The Same.
Life Is Hard
Doubt
Spirit
She Had Asked: What Is He? A Friend Or An Enemy? The Alethiometer Answered: He Is A Murderer. When She Saw The Answer, She Relaxed At Once. He Could Find Food, And Show Her How To Reach Oxford, And Those Were Powers That Were Useful, But He Might Still Have Been Untrustworthy Or Cowardly. A Murderer Was A Worthy Companion. She Felt As Safe With Him As She'd Done With Iorek Byrnison The Armoured Bear.
Oxford
Enemy
Done
I Don't See Any Sign Of God In This World, In The Place Where We Live And Things We Know. It Can All Be Explained To My Mind Perfectly Satisfactorily Without God. But In The Great Darkness Beyond This Little Spark Of Light Where I Live, Of Course There May Be All Kinds Of Things. There May Be A God. So I'm Really An Agnostic.
Light
Darkness
Mind
Religion Grants Its Adherents Malign, Intoxicating And Morally Corrosive Sensations. Destroying Intellectual Freedom Is Always Evil, But Only Religion Makes Doing Evil Feel Quite So Good.
Evil
Freedom Of Speech
Intellectual
...because Where We Are Is Always The Most Important Place.
Important
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.
Philosophy
Way
You Choose
He Meant The Kingdom Was Over, The Kingdom Of Heaven, It Was All Finished. We Shouldn't Live As If It Mattered More Than This Life In This World, Because Where We Are Is Always The Most Important Place.... We Have To Be All Those Difficult Things Like Cheerful And Kind And Curious And Patient, And We've Got To Study And Think And Work Hard, All Of Us, In All Our Different Worlds, And Then We'll Build... The Republic Of Heaven.
Hard Work
Thinking
Heaven
But Suppose Your Dæmon Settles In A Shape You Don't Like? Well, Then, You're Discontented, En't You? There's Plenty Of Folk As'd Like To Have A Lion As A Dæmon And They End Up With A Poodle. And Till They Learn To Be Satisfied With What They Are, They're Going To Be Fretful About It. Waste Of Feeling, That Is. But It Didn't Seem To Lyra That She Would Ever Grow Up.
Growing Up
Feelings
Lions
But I Know That All The Things I Do Know Are Very Small Compared With The Things That I Don't Know.
Knows
The Idea Hovered And Shimmered Delicately, Like A Soap Bubble, And She Dared Not Even Look At It Directly In Case It Burst. But She Was Familiar With The Way Of Ideas, And She Let It Shimmer, Looking Away, Thinking About Something Else.
Thinking
Ideas
Soap Bubbles
Stories Are The Most Important Thing In The World. Without Stories, We Wouldn't Be Human Beings At All.
Important
Stories
World
Iorek Byrnison: Can Is Not The Same As Must. Lyra Silvertongue: But If You Must And You Can, Then There's No Excuse.
No Excuses
Excuse
Ifs
Disney Is A Huge Presence When It Comes To Fairy Tales Because He’s Made Of Them Such Brilliant Artifacts In Terms Of Movie-making. But It’s Very Hard To Ignore What He’s Done To Them. I'm Not Interested In Denigrating Disney Or Even Commenting On Him Very Much. I'm More Interested In Seeing What I Can Do With The Stories Myself.
Stories
Done
Fairy Tale
A Story, To Me, Has A Particular Sprite, Like The Angel Of The Spirit Of That Story - And It's My Job To Attend To What It Wants To Do.
Jobs
Angel
Stories
The Way You Speak Of The Characters In Your Story Shows What You Think Of The Values Of Conservatives‚ Or Evolution, For Example. It Shows Where Your Moral Center Is. So You Are In The Message Business Whether You Like It Or Not.
Character
Thinking
Example
From What We Are, Spirit; From What We Do, Matter. Matter And Spirit Are One.
Matter
Spirit
To Get The Best Out Of Life Here ...good Grief. There's Plenty Of It About, So Indulge. Give Yourself Some Thing To Remember. Fall In Love. Fall Out Of Love. Gamble. Get Drunk. See How Long You Can Stay Awake. Go For Long Walks At Night. Discover What You're Afraid Of Doing, And Then Do It.
Falling In Love
Grief
Night
Was There Only One World After All Which Spent Its Time Dreaming Of Others?
Dream
World
I Am A Religious Person, Although I Am Not A Believer.
Religious
Believer
Persons
I Feel With Some Passion That What We Truly Are Is Private, And Almost Infinitely Complex, And Ambiguous, And Both External And Internal, And Double- Or Triple- Or Multiply Natured, And Largely Mysterious Even To Ourselves; And Furthermore That What We Are Is Only Part Of Us, Because Identity, Unlike "identity", Must Include What We Do. And I Think That To Find Oneself And Every Aspect Of This Complexity Reduced In The Public Mind To One Property That Apparently Subsumes All The Rest ("gay", "black", "muslim", Whatever) Is To Be The Victim Of A Piece Of Extraordinary Intellectual Vulgarity.
Passion
Gay
Thinking
Argue With Anything Else, But Don't Argue With Your Own Nature.
Arguing
...when All The Openings Were Closed, Then The Worlds Would All Be Restored To Their Proper Relations With One Another, Lyra’s Oxford And Will’s Would Lie Over Each Other Again, Like Transparent Images On Two Sheets Of Film Being Moved Closer And Closer Until They Merged–although They Would Never Truly Touch.
Lying
Oxford
Two
If You Want To Write Anything That Works, You Have To Go With The Grain Of Your Talent, Not Against It. If Your Talent Is Inert And Sullen In The Face Of Business Or Politics...but Takes Fire At The Thought Of Ghosts And Vampires And Witches And Demons Then Feed The Flames, Feed The Flames.
Writing
Fire
Flames
The E-book Revolution Has Made It Very Easy To Pay Writers A Good Deal Less Than What Their Work Is Worth. I Do Strongly Believe That We Writers Ought To Hold Out For Much Better Royalties.
Book
Believe
Pay
I Am A Story Teller. If I Wanted To Send A Message I Would Have Written A Sermon.
Writing
Stories
Messages
I Write Almost Always In The Third Person, And I Don't Think The Narrator Is Male Or Female Anyway. They're Both, And Young And Old, And Wise And Silly, And Sceptical And Credulous, And Innocent And Experienced, All At Once. Narrators Are Not Even Human - They're Sprites.
Wise
Silly
Writing
I Seemed To Have Spent The Whole Time Either Reading, Which I Loved, Or Laughing, Which I Love, Or Fooling About, Which I Loved. There Was The Usual Teenage Angst: "nobody Understands Me" And "i'm The Only Genius In The World" And All That Stuff. But That Didn't Get Very Deep.
Teenage
Reading
Laughing
Everything Means Something.
Mean
His Dark Materials
I Don't Profess Any Religion; I Don't Think It's Possible That There Is A God.... My Books Are About Killing God.
Book
Thinking
Killing
I Stopped Believing There Was A Power Of Good And A Power Of Evil That Were Outside Us. And I Came To Believe That Good And Evil Are Names For What People Do, Not For What They Are.
Life
Believe
Names
If There Is A War To Be Fought, We Don’t Consider Cost One Of The Factors In Deciding Whether Or Not To Fight.
War
Fighting
Cost
We Have To Learn Everything We Do.
The Great Thing About Fairy Tales And Folk Tales Is That There Is No Authentic Text.
Fairy Tale
Fairy
Great Things
I Wanted To Avoid What Some Modern Tellers Have Done, Quite Legitimately, To Make Fairy Tales More Like Novels And Short Stories, To Characterize The Heroes And The Heroines Much More Than They Are Characterized In Grimm. I Like The Psychological Flatness Of Them, The Fact That They're More Like Masks Than Individuals.
Hero
Stories
Done
You Don't Win Races By Wishing, You Win Them By Running Faster Than Everyone Else Does.
Running
Winning
Race
If You Can't Think Of What To Write, Tough Luck; Write Anyway.
Writing
Thinking
Luck
Understanding Quotes: Their Essence and Application

Quotes, or quotations, are powerful tools in communication, encapsulating ideas, emotions, and wisdom in concise expressions. They serve various purposes across different contexts, from academic writing to everyday conversation.

1. Defining Quotes

A quote is a repetition of someone else's statement or thoughts. It can be a direct replication of words spoken or written by another individual, often used to support arguments, provide evidence, or convey profound insights.


2. The Importance of Quotes

2.1. Enhancing Credibility

Incorporating quotes from authoritative sources can bolster the credibility of your work. By referencing experts or primary sources, you demonstrate thorough research and a solid foundation for your arguments.


2.2. Providing Evidence

Quotes serve as concrete evidence to support claims. In academic and professional writing, they validate points made, offering readers a basis to trust the information presented.


2.3. Conveying Emotions and Perspectives

Quotes can encapsulate emotions and perspectives succinctly. They allow writers to express complex feelings or viewpoints through the words of others, often more eloquently than paraphrasing.


3. Types of Quotes

3.1. Direct Quotes

Direct quotes involve copying the exact words from a source, enclosed in quotation marks. They are used when the original wording is significant or particularly well-expressed.


3.2. Indirect Quotes (Paraphrasing)

Indirect quotes restate the original message in your own words. While not enclosed in quotation marks, they still require proper attribution to the original source.


3.3. Block Quotes

Block quotes are lengthy direct quotations, formatted as a separate block of text. They are typically used for quotes exceeding a certain length, varying by citation style. For instance, in APA style, quotes longer than 40 words are formatted as block quotes.



4. Proper Usage of Quotes


4.1. Contextual Relevance

Ensure that the quote you choose is relevant to the topic and adds value to your content. Avoid inserting quotes solely for decorative purposes.


4.2. Integration into Your Writing

Seamlessly integrate quotes into your writing. Introduce them appropriately and follow up with analysis or commentary to connect them to your main points.


4.3. Attribution and Citation

Always attribute quotes to their original authors and provide proper citations according to the required style guide (APA, MLA, Chicago, etc.).


5. Common Mistakes to Avoid


5.1. Overusing Quotes

Relying too heavily on quotes can overshadow your voice. Use them sparingly to support your arguments, not replace them.


5.2. Lack of Analysis

Presenting a quote without analysis or explanation can leave readers questioning its relevance. Always follow up with your interpretation or discussion.


5.3. Misquoting or Taking Out of Context

Ensure that quotes are accurate and not taken out of context, as this can mislead readers and undermine your credibility.



6. Quotes in Different Contexts


6.1. Academic Writing

In academic writing, quotes are used to support arguments, provide evidence, and engage with existing literature. Proper citation is crucial to avoid plagiarism.


6.2. Journalism

Journalists use quotes to provide firsthand accounts, add authenticity, and present multiple perspectives within a story.


6.3. Literature and Creative Writing

In literature, quotes can be used to convey character voices, themes, and stylistic elements. They enrich narratives and provide depth to storytelling.



7. Punctuation and Formatting


Understanding the correct punctuation and formatting of quotes is essential:


Quotation Marks: Always enclose direct quotes within quotation marks.


Punctuation Placement: In American English, periods and commas are placed inside quotation marks, while colons and semicolons are placed outside.


Block Quotes: For longer quotes, format them as block quotes without quotation marks, and indent the entire block.



8. Ethical Considerations


Ethical use of quotes involves accurate representation, proper attribution, and respect for intellectual property. Misuse can lead to plagiarism, which carries serious academic and professional consequences.

9. Tools for Managing Quotes


Utilize tools like citation generators and plagiarism checkers to manage quotes effectively. These tools help ensure proper formatting and originality in your writing.



Conclusion


Quotes are invaluable in enriching content, providing evidence, and conveying complex ideas succinctly. When used appropriately, they enhance the quality and credibility of your writing. Always ensure relevance, proper integration, and ethical usage to maximize their impact.


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