“The Golden Compass” sentence starters
“You cannot change what you are, only what you do.”
“That is the duty of the old, to be anxious on the behalf of the young. And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old.”
“You are so young, too young to understand this, but I shall tell you anyway and you’ll understand it later.”
“When a little boy is growing, he thinks he is immortal.”
“Each time becomes more painful, until finally your heart is broken.”
“You speak of destiny as if it was fixed.”
“We are all subject to the fates. But we must act as if we are not, or die of despair.”
“When he’d sworn at her and been sworn at in return, they became great friends.”
“All good things pass away.”
“Human beings can’t see anything without wanting to destroy it.”
“I’m going to destroy it.”
“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.”
“Death will sweep through all the worlds; it will be the triumph of despair, forever.”
“When you live for many hundreds of years, you know that every opportunity will come again.”
“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.”
“If there is war to be fought, we don’t consider cost one of the factors in deciding whether or not it is right to fight.”
“ What would it matter if you did?”
“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.”
“One moment several things are possible, the next moment only one happens, and the rest don’t exist.”
“We feel cold, but we don’t mind it.”
“Men pass in front of our eyes like butterflies, creatures of a brief season. We love them; they are brave, proud, beautiful, and clever; and they die almost at once”
“It doesn’t work like that.”
“What’s happening is that the Shadows are responding to the attention you pay them.”
“I didn’t have anything in mind, and you well know it.”
