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"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."
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"Fiction writers, magicians, politicians and priests are the only people rewarded for entertaining us with their lies."

"What would you think if I told you that I wasn't an Allomancer? Sazed asked."I'd think that you were lying, Vin said."Have you known me to lie before?"The best liars are those who tell the truth most of the time."

"I apologize for lying to you. I promise I won't deceive you except in matters of this sort."

"Nothing is so boring as having to keep up a deception."
Explore more quotes by Philip Pullman

"Fritz had to stop himself from interrupting when Karl spoke about the difficulty of working. Stories are just as hard as clocks to put together, and they can go wrong just as easily--as we shall soon see with Fritz's own story in a page or two. Still, Fritz was an optimist, and Karl was a pessimist, and that makes all the difference in the world."

"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!"

"As for what it's against - the story is against those who pervert and misuse religion, or any other kind of doctrine with a holy book and a priesthood and an apparatus of power that wields unchallengeable authority, in order to dominate and suppress human freedoms."

"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."

"The act of true reading is in its very essence democratic. Consider the nature of what happens when we read a book - and I mean, of course, a work of literature, not an instruction manual or a textbook - in private, unsupervised, un-spied-on, alone. It isn't like a lecture: it's like a conversation. There's a back-and-forthness about it. The book proposes, the reader questions, the book responds, the reader considers. We bring our own preconceptions and expectations, our own intellectual qualities, and our limitations, too, our own previous experiences of reading, our own temperament, our own hopes and fears, our own personality to the encounter."

"Princess, princess, youngest daughter,Open up and let me in!Or else your promise by the waterIsn't worth a rusty pin.Keep your promise, royal daughter,Open up and let me in!"
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