More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
IN A VALLEY shaded with rhododendrons, close to the snow line, where a stream milky with melt-water splashed and where doves and linnets flew among the immense pines, lay a cave, half-hidden by the crag above and the stiff heavy leaves that clustered below.
she had hair of a colour Ama had never seen before – a tawny fairness like a lion’s.
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.
Will held out the knife again and felt for those tiny halts and hesitations. There were far more of them than he’d thought. And as he felt them without the need to cut through at once, he found that they each had a different quality: this one was hard and definite, that one cloudy; a third was slippery, a fourth brittle and frail. .
With every increase in his knowledge came a gain in strength.
Dust is only a name for what happens when matter begins to understand itself.
The whole of nature was overturned.
“I’m just trying to wake up – I’m so afraid of sleeping all my life and then dying –
With ambitious aim Against the throne and monarchy of God Rais’d impious war in heav’n and battel proud. John Milton
At the western end of a range of saw-toothed mountains, on a peak that commanded wide views of the plain below and the valleys behind, a fortress of basalt seemed to grow out of the mountain as if some volcano had thrust it up a million years before.
The Authority considers that conscious beings of every kind have become dangerously independent, so Metatron is going to intervene much more actively in human affairs.
Far below, the deathless fires put out their glow and smoke on the darkling air, and even at this great height the clang of hammers could be heard in the snapping wind.
The child, then, is in the position of Eve, the wife of Adam, the mother of us all, and the cause of all sin.”
The Oblation Board sought to understand the effects of Dust: we must destroy it altogether.
But better a world with no church and no Dust than a world where every day we have to struggle under the hideous burden of sin.
How much better for us all if there had been a Father Gomez in the garden of Eden! We would never have left paradise.”
To begin with, although most of it was covered in short grass in an infinite variety of buff-brown-green-ochre-yellow-golden shades, and undulating very gently in a way that the long evening light showed up clearly, the prairie seemed to be laced through and through with what looked like rivers of rock with a light grey surface. And secondly, here and there on the plain were stands of the tallest trees Mary had ever seen. Attending a high-energy physics conference once in California she had taken time out to look at the great redwood trees, and marvelled: but whatever these trees were, they
...more
She walked along the floor of the grove feeling much as if she were in a cathedral: there was the same stillness, the same sense of upwardness in the structures, the same awe in herself.
Balthamos couldn’t tell; he only knew that half his heart had been extinguished. He couldn’t keep still: he flew up again, scouring the sky as if to seek out Baruch in this cloud or that, calling, crying, calling; and then he’d be overcome with guilt, and fly down to urge Will to hide and keep quiet, and promise to watch over him tirelessly; and then the pressure of his grief would crush him to the ground, and he’d remember every instance of kindness and courage that Baruch had ever shown, and there were thousands, and he’d forgotten none of them; and he’d cry that a nature so gracious could
...more
His dæmon – a seagull – vanished as if she’d been pinched out of existence like a candle flame.
They explained that the seed-pods needed the constant pounding they got on the hard roads if they were to crack at all, and also that the seeds were difficult to germinate. Without the mulefa’s attention, the trees would all die. Each species depended on the other, and furthermore, it was the oil that made it possible. It was hard to understand, but they seemed to be saying that the oil was the centre of their thinking and feeling; that young ones didn’t have the wisdom of their elders because they couldn’t use the wheels, and thus could absorb no oil through their claws.
There had once been a time when the seed-pods were plentiful, and when the world was rich and full of life, and the mulefa lived with their trees in perpetual joy. But something bad had happened many years ago; some virtue had gone out of the world; because despite every effort and all the love and attention the mulefa could give them, the wheel-pod trees were dying.
A truth that’s told with bad intent Beats all the lies you can invent. William Blake
Lyra lay hot and almost as restless, but deep, deep asleep, locked into oblivion by the draught her mother had forced down her only an hour before. There was a dream that had occupied her for a long time, and now it had returned, and little whimpers of pity and rage and Lyratic resolution shook her breast and her throat, making Pantalaimon grind his polecat-teeth in sympathy.
They crouched on the cave floor behind a large rock, with the bird-formed Balthamos beside them, their eyes taking some moments to adjust from the moon-drenched brilliance of the other world.
Will breathed in the scent of Lyra’s sleepy body with a happy satisfaction: she was here, she was real.
I got to go down into the land of the dead and find him, and . . . and say sorry. I don’t care what happens after that. Then we can. . . I can. . . It doesn’t matter after that.”
How lucky Will was that she was awake now to look after him! He was truly fearless, and she admired that beyond measure; but he wasn’t good at lying and betraying and cheating, which all came to her as naturally as breathing. When she thought of that she felt warm and virtuous, because she did it for Will, never for herself.
“The intentions of a tool are what it does. A hammer intends to strike, a vice 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. Can you see the sharpest edge of that knife?”
It said the knife would be the death of Dust, but then it said it was the only way to keep Dust alive. I
Will was thinking that the whole of the rest of his life depended on what happened in that tiny triangle of metal, that point that searched out the gaps inside the atoms, and all his nerves trembled, sensing every flicker of every flame and the loosening of every atom in the lattice of the metal.
“They should not have made that knife,” said Iorek, after they had walked a little way. “Maybe I should not have mended it. I’m troubled, and I have never been troubled before, never in doubt. Now I am full of doubt. Doubt is a human thing, not a bear thing. If I am becoming human, something’s wrong, something’s bad. And I’ve made it worse.”
They walked on till they came to a big drift of snow, and Iorek lay in it and rolled this way and that, sending flurries of snow up into the dark air so that it looked as if he himself were made of snow, he was the personification of all the snow in the world.
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.
It was shorter, and much less elegant, and there was a dull silver surface over each of the joins. It looked ugly now; it looked like what it was, wounded.
Without a word he began to lick them clean; his tongue was soothing on the burns, and she felt as safe as she had ever felt in her life.
“Can is not the same as must.” “But if you must and you can, then there’s no excuse.” “While you are alive, your business is with life.”
“It shocked some of us too to learn that the Authority is not the creator. There may have been a creator, or there may not: we don’t know. All we know is that at some point the Authority took charge, and since then, angels have rebelled, and human beings have struggled against him too. This is the last rebellion. Never before have humans and angels, and beings from all the worlds, made a common cause. This is the greatest force ever assembled. But it may still not be enough. We shall see.”
“We’re not going to invade the kingdom,” he said, “but if the kingdom invades us, they had better be ready for war, because we are prepared. Mrs Coulter, I am a king, but it’s my proudest task to join Lord Asriel in setting up a world where there are no kingdoms at all. No kings, no bishops, no priests. The kingdom of heaven has been known by that name since the Authority first set himself above the rest of the angels. And we want no part of it. This world is different. We intend to be free citizens of the republic of heaven.”
The colour was slowly seeping out of the world. A dim green-grey for the bright green of the trees and the grass, a dim sand-grey for the vivid yellow of a field of corn, a dim blood-grey for the red bricks of a neat farmhouse.
The deaths stood politely along the wall, and it was strange to see how little space they took up, and to find how little notice they attracted.
the sraf isn’t falling down, it’s moving out towards the sea. When a flower happens to be facing the land, the sraf can enter it. That’s why there are still some seed-pods growing. But most of them face upwards, and the sraf just drifts past without entering. The flowers must have evolved like that because in the past all the sraf fell straight down. Something has happened to the sraf, not to the trees.
the crucifix around his neck and the rifle at his back were twin tokens of his absolute determination to complete the task.
But she suddenly thought now that if ever there was a voice that would lap you in safety and warm you with love, it would be a voice like the Lady Salmakia’s, and she felt a wish in her heart to have a child of her own, to lull and soothe and sing to, one day, in a voice like that.
Lyra was doing the cruellest thing she had ever done, hating herself, hating the deed, suffering for Pan and with Pan and because of Pan; trying to put him down on the cold path, disengaging his cat-claws from her clothes, weeping, weeping.
He seemed to be so young, a cub, a puppy, something helpless and beaten, a creature so sunk in misery that it was more misery than creature.
it was mental, too: something secret and private was being dragged into the open where it had no wish to be, and Will was nearly overcome by a mixture of pain and shame and fear and self-reproach, because he himself had caused it.
