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.
“And then someone passed me a bit of some sweet stuff and I suddenly realized Ihad been to China. So to speak. And I’d forgotten it. It was the taste of the sweet stuff that brought it back—I think it was marzipan. Sweet almond paste,”
-중략-
“And I think it was at that party, or it might have been at another one, that we kissed each other for the first time. It was in a garden, and there was the sound of music from inside, and the quiet and the cool among the trees, and I wasaching —all my body wasaching for him, and I could tell he felt the same—and we were both almost too shy to move. Almost. But one of us did and then without any interval between—it was like a quantum leap,suddenly —we were kissing each other, and oh, it was more than China, it was paradise.
“We saw each other about half a dozen times, no more. And then his parents moved away and I never saw him again. It was such a sweet time, so short…But there it was. I’d known it. Ihad been to China.”
It was the strangest thing: Lyra knew exactly what she meant, and half an hour earlier she would have had no idea at all. And inside her, that rich house with all its doors open and all its rooms lit stood waiting, quiet, expectant.
“And at half past nine in the evening at that restaurant table in Portugal,” Mary continued, “someone gave me a piece of marzipan and it all came back. And I thought: am I really going to spend the rest of my life without ever feeling that again? I thought: Iwant to go to China. It’s full of treasures and strangeness and mystery and joy.
The Amber Spyglass (His Dark Materials, 3) - Philip Pullman
