More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
And for the second time in their lives, but not the last, each of them saw their own expression on the other’s face.
“There’s some that came here never believing they were dead. They insisted all the way that they were alive, it was a mistake, someone would have to pay; made no difference. There’s others who longed to be dead when they were alive, poor souls; lives full of pain or misery; killed themselves for a chance of a blessed rest, and found that nothing had changed except for the worse, and this time there was no escape; you can’t make yourself alive again. And there’s been others so frail and sickly, little infants, sometimes, that they’re scarcely born into the living before they come down to the
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
it sounded as if her voice was coming from everywhere, and the word echoed back from the great wall in the fog, muffled and changed, so that she seemed to be screaming Lyra’s name, so that Lyra and liar were one and the same thing.
No doubt it was because she didn’t have Pantalaimon any more, but she clung close to Will’s arm, and he was glad she did.
He heard a tone in her voice, and he saw an expression on her face, which he knew and liked more than anything he’d ever known: it showed she was thinking of something daring, but she wasn’t ready to speak of it yet. He nodded, to show he’d understood.
Maybe the people in Lyra’s world are the only living beings to know they have. Maybe that’s why it was one of them who started the revolt.”
“The boy would go with her to the end of the world.”
He turned and gave her a true smile, so warm and happy she felt something stumble and falter inside her; at least, it felt like that, but without Pantalaimon she couldn’t ask herself what it meant. It might have been a new way for her heart to beat. Deeply surprised, she told herself to walk straight and stop feeling giddy.
as if the gloom were gathering itself into little clots of malice and giving them wings.
Lyra began to explain, quite unaware of how her voice changed, how she sat up straighter, and how even her eyes looked different when she told the story of her meeting with Will and the fight for the subtle knife. How could she have known? But Roger noticed, with the sad voiceless envy of the unchanging dead.
Don’t think of then. It’s enough to think of now.
“Then,” said Tialys, “let’s make a bargain with you. Instead of seeing only the wickedness and cruelty and greed of the ghosts that come down here, from now on you will have the right to ask every ghost to tell you the story of their lives, and they will have to tell the truth about what they’ve seen and touched and heard and loved and known in the world. Every one of these ghosts has a story; every single one that comes down in the future will have true things to tell you about the world. And you’ll have the right to hear them, and they will have to tell you.”
Even if it means oblivion, friends, I’ll welcome it, because it won’t be nothing, we’ll be alive again in a thousand blades of grass, and a million leaves, we’ll be falling in the raindrops and blowing in the fresh breeze, we’ll be glittering in the dew under the stars and the moon out there in the physical world which is our true home and always was.
“There’s probably a great deal that’s mysterious to you, my Lord President, starting with the relations between a mother and her child. If you thought for one moment that I would release my daughter into the care – the care! – of a body of men with a feverish obsession with sexuality, men with dirty fingernails, reeking of ancient sweat, men whose furtive imaginations would crawl over her body like cockroaches – if you thought I would expose my child to that, my Lord President, you are more stupid than you take me for.”
She sipped her chocolatl, which was thin and weak; how like these tedious priests, she thought, to take their self-righteous abstinence out on their visitors too.
Is he still alive, at some inconceivable age, decrepit and demented, unable to think or act or speak and unable to die, a rotten hulk? And if that is his condition, wouldn’t it be the most merciful thing, the truest proof of our love for God, to seek him out and give him the gift of death?”
there’s an invisible assassin in this place, I can only imagine it’s the Devil himself. I dare say he feels quite at home.”
The golden monkey tucked Mrs Coulter’s silk collar inside solicitously, for all the world like a fastidious couturier attending to his favourite model, while all the time making sure that Lord Roke was completely hidden in the folds of the coat.
can’t look back all the time because I got to watch where I’m going, so I got to trust you to come on steady after us, all right?”
“You haven’t closed every window you’ve made.” “No, because I couldn’t, some of them. But I know I should. Things go wrong if they’re left open. And one that big. . .” He gestured downwards, not wanting to look. “It’s wrong. Something bad will happen.”
she didn’t know that Will was yelling her name so loudly that the abyss resounded with it.
“The man you knew as Sir Charles Latrom had to return to his own world periodically; he could not live permanently in mine. The philosophers of the Guild of the Torre degli Angeli, who travelled between worlds for three hundred years or more, found the same thing to be true, and gradually their world weakened and decayed as a result.
your dæmon can only live its full life in the world it was born in. Elsewhere it will eventually sicken and die. We can travel, if there are openings into other worlds, but we can only live in our own. Lord Asriel’s great enterprise will fail in the end for the same reason: we have to build the republic of heaven where we are, because for us there is no elsewhere.
when she looked through her spyglass and saw the relentless outward drift of the sraf, the Shadow-particles, it seemed to her as if happiness and life and hope were drifting away with them. She could find no explanation at all.
The Shadow-particles knew what was happening, and were sorrowful.
The sun crossed the cold blue sky and then moved down to the south-west, gilding the clouds and tinting the vapour around the mountain every shade of cream and scarlet, of apricot and orange. When the sun sank, the clouds glowed faintly from within.
their bomb not only opened an abyss below the worlds, but also fractured the structure of things so profoundly that there are fissures and cracks everywhere.
Each Man is in his Spectre’s power Until the arrival of that hour When his Humanity awake William Blake
In the ghost-light he saw her bright hair, her firm-set mouth, her candid eyes: he felt the warmth of her breath; he caught the friendly scent of her flesh.
for the first time, Will and Lyra thought they could see those things, like veils of shimmering gauze, falling from the sky like thistledown.
“What do you see?” “Corruption and envy and lust for power. Cruelty and coldness. A vicious probing curiosity. Pure, poisonous, toxic malice. You have never from your earliest years shown a shred of compassion or sympathy or kindness without calculating how it would return to your advantage. You have tortured and killed without regret or hesitation; you have betrayed and intrigued and gloried in your treachery. You are a cess-pit of moral filth.”
There was no floor; the sides sloped vertiginously down towards the edge of a great pit hundreds of feet below, and darker than darkness itself, and into the pit streamed the endless Dust-fall, pouring ceaselessly down. Its billions of particles were like the stars of every galaxy in the sky, and every one of them was a little fragment of conscious thought. It was a melancholy light to see by.
And even in that horrible urgency, even at that moment of utmost peril, each of them felt the same little shock of excitement: for Lyra was holding Will’s dæmon, the nameless wildcat, and Will was carrying Pantalaimon. They tore their glance away from each other’s eyes.
Out of the little grove, away from the baffled Spectres, out of the valley, past the mighty form of his old companion the armour-clad bear, the last little scrap of the consciousness that had been the aëronaut Lee Scoresby floated upwards, just as his great balloon had done so many times. Untroubled by the flares and the bursting shells, deaf to the explosions and the shouts and cries of anger and warning and pain, conscious only of his movement upwards, the last of Lee Scoresby passed through the heavy clouds and came out under the brilliant stars, where the atoms of his beloved dæmon Hester
...more
It was quite unlike the brutal rational way roads in Will’s world sliced through hillsides and leapt across valleys on bridges of concrete. This was part of the landscape, not an imposition on it.
There was nothing crude about them; each door and window-frame and lintel was covered in subtle patterns, but patterns that weren’t carved in the wood: it was as if they’d persuaded the wood to grow in that shape naturally.
Lyra, looking at Will, thought that if he fell in love, he would be like that.
she smiled at him, a smile of such sweet knowledge and joy that his senses felt confused. He smiled back, and Mary thought his expression showed more perfect trust than she’d ever seen on a human face.
The Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake, that’s all.”
we kept on talking and then there was a birthday cake. And he took a bit of marzipan and he just gently put it in my mouth – I remember trying to smile, and blushing, and feeling so foolish – and I fell in love with him just for that, for the gentle way he touched my lips with the marzipan.”
She felt as if she had been handed the key to a great house she hadn’t known was there, a house that was somehow inside her, and as she turned the key, deep in the darkness of the building she felt other doors opening too, and lights coming on.
I felt as if something they all passionately believed in depended on me carrying on with something I didn’t.
And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are.
Shew you all alive The world, where every particle of dust breathes forth its joy. William Blake
The entire world was alive and conscious.
This was the very thing she’d told Will about when he asked if she missed God: it was the sense that the whole universe was alive, and that everything was connected to everything else by threads of meaning.
the vast flood in the sky was another matter entirely. That was new, and it was catastrophic. And if it wasn’t stopped, all conscious life would come to an end. As the mulefa had shown her, Dust came into being when living things became conscious of themselves; but it needed some feedback system to reinforce it and make it safe, as the mulefa had their wheels and the oil from the trees. Without something like that, it would all vanish. Thought, imagination, feeling, would all wither and blow away, leaving nothing but a brutish automatism; and that brief period when life was conscious of itself
...more
Matter loved Dust. It didn’t want to see it go. That was the meaning of this night, and it was Mary’s meaning too. Had she thought there was no meaning in life, no purpose, when God had gone? Yes, she had thought that. “Well, there is now,” she said aloud, and again, louder: “There is now!”
The birthday of my life Is come, my love is come to me. Christina Rossetti
They might have been the only people in the world.
