I am a lesbian, and it was a later in life recognition of that fact.
So Lyra and her daemon turned away from the world they were born in, and looked toward the sun, and walked into the sky.
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. ”
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.
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.
And think what worrying does: has anyone ever added a single hour to the length of his life by worrying about it?
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.
There was one who thought himself above me, and he was above me until he had that thought.
I didn't think I was fat. I just thought I didn't need to gain any weight. But I would drop weight and then I would be comfortable with that number. Then I would lose more weight and that would become my new number.
I prize the Depression, for instance, because I learned the value of things in the Depression that a way people who don't have to worry about such things never learned to prize it really, I believe.
Who would have ever thought I'd find love, contentment and joy in a prison cell, but I did. I knew that I knew that I knew that day, I'd been released, and I thought to myself, "I need to tell everyone about this" because no one had ever told me.