The Subtle Knife (His Dark Materials, #2)

by Philip Pullman

That is what the church does, and every church is the same: control, destroy, obliterate every good feeling.

It was a dream about a head.

“Sounds like what we call physics, your experimental theology. You want scientists, not theologians.”

They got off in the city centre next to an old stone church, which she did know, opposite a big department store which she didn’t.

She discovered that it was a museum. The doors were open, and inside she found stuffed animals and fossil skeletons and cases of minerals, just like the Royal Geological Museum she’d visited with Mrs Coulter in her London. At the back of the great iron and glass hall was the entrance to another part of the museum, and because it was nearly deserted, she went through and looked around. The alethiometer was still the most urgent thing on her mind, but in this second chamber she found herself surrounded by things she knew well: there were showcases filled with Arctic clothing, just like her own furs – with sledges and walrus ivory carvings and seal-hunting harpoons – with a thousand and one jumbled trophies and relics and objects of magic and tools and weapons, and not only from the Arctic, as she saw, but from every part of this world.

Was there only one world after all, which spent its time dreaming of others?

These rooms, the walls of this corridor, were all flat and bare and plain in a way Lyra thought belonged to poverty, not to the scholarship and splendour of Oxford; and yet the brick walls were smoothly painted, and the doors were of heavy wood and the banisters of polished steel, so they were costly.

flat and bare and plain in a way Lyra thought belonged to poverty, not to the scholarship and splendour of Oxford; and yet the brick walls were smoothly painted, and the doors were of heavy wood and the banisters of polished steel, so they were costly.

“There’s so many ways this place is different. The traffic, for one. I don’t like it. I like the cinema, though, and hamburgers.

witches say the sky is thin there, behind the northern lights.”

and there are few natural philosophers as frustrated as astronomers in a fog.

Everything Will could see spoke of wealth and power, the sort of informal settled superiority that some upper-class English people still took for granted.

“Angel is the name of their office, not of their nature. If you seek the name of their nature, it is spirit; if you seek the name of their office, it is angel; from what they are, spirit, from what they do, angel.”

And did you intervene in human evolution? Yes. Why? Vengeance. Vengeance for – oh! Rebel angels! After the war in Heaven – Satan and the garden of Eden – but it isn’t true, is it? Is that what you – but why? Find the girl and the boy. Waste no more time. You must play the serpent.

“The Spectres feast as vampyres feast on blood, but the Spectres’ food is attention. A conscious and informed interest in the world. The immaturity of children is less attractive to them.”

The Oblation Board and the Spectres of Indifference are both bewitched by this truth about human beings: that innocence is different from experience.

Living was hateful and death was no better, and from end to end of the universe, this was the first and last and only truth.

Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit.