The Secret Commonwealth Quotes

“The other side’s got an energy that our side en’t got. Comes from their certainty about being right. If you got that certainty, you’ll be willing to do anything to bring about the end you want. It’s the oldest human problem, Lyra, an’ it’s the difference between good and evil. Evil can be unscrupulous, and good can’t. Evil has nothing to stop it doing what it wants, while good has one hand tied behind its back. To do the things it needs to do to win, it’d have to become evil to do ’em.”
― Philip Pullman, The Secret Commonwealth

“You're in a world full of color and you want to see it in black and white.”
― Philip Pullman, The Secret Commonwealth

“You won’t understand anything about the imagination until you realise that it’s not about making things up, it’s about perception.”
― Philip Pullman, The Secret Commonwealth

“Had reason ever created a poem, or a symphony, or a painting? If rationality can’t see things like the secret commonwealth, it’s because rationality’s vision is limited. The secret commonwealth is there. We can’t see it with rationality any more than we can weigh something with a microscope: it’s the wrong sort of instrument. We need to imagine as well as measure ...”
― Philip Pullman, The Secret Commonwealth

“She couldn't get any further at that point. The sky full of stars seemed dead and cold, everything in it the result of the mechanical, indifferent interactions of molecules and particles that would continue for the rest of time whether Lyra lived or died, whether human beings were conscious or unconscious: a vast silent empty indifference, all quite meaningless.
Reason had brought her to this state. She had exalted reason over every other faculty. The result had been - was now - the deepest unhappiness she had ever felt.”
― Philip Pullman, The Secret Commonwealth

“Mr. Scoresby...told me there were truthtellers, and they needed to know what the truth was, so as to tell it. And there were liars, and they needed to know what the truth was, so they could change it or avoid it. And there were bullshitters, who didn't care about the truth at all. They weren't interested. What they spoke wasn't the truth and it wasn't lies; it was bullshit. All they were interested in was their own performance.”
― Philip Pullman, The Secret Commonwealth

“What is the world of the spirits? It is nothing I know about. I don't know what spirit is."
"Spirit is what matter does.”
― Philip Pullman, The Secret Commonwealth

“You won't understand anything about imagination until you realise that it's not about making things up, it's about perception.”
― Philip Pullman, The Secret Commonwealth

“But then she remembered what the gyptians had said: Include things, don’t leave them out. Look at things in their context. Include everything.”
― Philip Pullman, The Secret Commonwealth

“You used to be optimistic. You used to think that whatever we did would turn out well. Even after we came back from the north, you used to think that. Now you're cautious, you're anxious… You're pessimistic."

She knew he was right, but it wasn't right that he should speak to her accusingly, as if it was something to blame her for.

"I used to be young," was all she could find to say.”
― Philip Pullman, The Secret Commonwealth

“Lyra bent over the open vessel and found the concentrated fragrance of every rose that had ever bloomed: a sweetness and power so profound that it moved beyond sweetness altogether and out of the other side of its own complexity into a realm of clear and simple purity and beauty. It was the smell of sunlight itself.”
― Philip Pullman, The Secret Commonwealth

“Knowledge is like water: it always finds gaps to leak through. There are too many people, too many journals, too many places of learning, who already know something about it.”
― Philip Pullman, The Secret Commonwealth

“Keep away from the literal-minded folk, and ignore the scoffers.”
― Philip Pullman, The Secret Commonwealth

“It’s the oldest human problem, Lyra, an’ it’s the difference between good and evil. Evil can be unscrupulous, and good can’t. Evil has nothing to stop it doing what it wants, while good has one hand tied behind its back. To do the things it needs to do to win, it’d have to become evil to do ’em.”
― Philip Pullman, The Secret Commonwealth

“We need to imagine as well as measure.”
― Philip Pullman, The Secret Commonwealth

“It was nothing more than what it was.”
― Philip Pullman, The Secret Commonwealth

“But we shouldn't believe things because it makes us happy to, she thought. We should believe things because they're true, and if that makes us unhappy, that's very unfortunate, but it's not the reason of fault.”
― Philip Pullman, The Secret Commonwealth

“She gathered the little cards together with an automatic hand. That was the phrase that came to her, as if her hand were purely mechanical, not alive at all, as if the messages from her skin and her nerves were changes in the anbaric current along a copper wire, not anything conscious. With that vision of her body as something dead and mechanical came a sense of listless desolation. She felt not only as if she were dead now, but that she’d always been dead, and had only dreamed of being alive, and that there was no life in the dream either: it was only the meaningless and indifferent jostling of particles in her brain, and nothing more.
But that little chain of ideas provoked a spasm of reaction, and she thought, No! That’s a lie! That’s slander! I don’t believe it!
Except that she did believe it, just then, and it was killing her.”
― Philip Pullman, The Secret Commonwealth

“The moon was climbing the sky, and the vast sweep of the milky way stretched above, every one of those minute specks a sun in its own system, lighting and warming planets, maybe, and life, maybe, and some kind of wondering being, maybe, looking out at the little star that was her sun, and at this world, and at Lyra.”
― Philip Pullman, The Secret Commonwealth

“She felt so alone. She felt as if her life had gone into a kind of hibernation, as if part of her were asleep and maybe dreaming the rest. She let herself be passive; she accepted whatever happened.”
― Philip Pullman, The Secret Commonwealth

“they have separated their intelligences from their other faculties. And that is not an intelligent thing to do.”
― Philip Pullman, The Secret Commonwealth

“But we shouldn't believe things because it makes us happy, she thought. We should believe things because they're true, and if that makes us unhappy that's very unfortunate, but it's not the fault of reason.”
― Philip Pullman, The Secret Commonwealth

“with his lumpish sow dæmon sprawled on the ground beside him, gnawing a turnip.”
― Philip Pullman, The Secret Commonwealth

“She’d hardly been aware of feeling anxious, but that was because anxiety was everywhere, built into the very molecules of the world, or so it had seemed.”
― Philip Pullman, The Secret Commonwealth

“Reason had brought her to this state. She had exalted reason over every other faculty. The result had been—was now—the deepest unhappiness she had ever felt.”
― Philip Pullman, The Secret Commonwealth

“The meaning of something is its connection to something else”
― Philip Pullman, The Secret Commonwealth

“Then excuse me, Miss Silver, but they have separated their intelligences from their other faculties. And that is not an intelligent thing to do.”
― Philip Pullman, The Secret Commonwealth

“That’s interesting,” said Dr. Lieberson. “History’s not over, you see. It’s happening all the time.”
― Philip Pullman, The Secret Commonwealth

“Pan hated seeing people die, because of what happened to their dæmons: they vanished like a candle flame going out. He wanted to console this poor creature, who knew she was going to disappear, but all she wanted to do was feel a last touch of the warmth she’d found in her man’s body all their lives together. The man took a shallow, rasping breath, and then the pretty hawk dæmon drifted out of existence altogether.”
― Philip Pullman, The Secret Commonwealth

“And she found herself thinking about roses and Dust. The street below her was saturated in Dust. Human lives were generating it, being sustained and enriched by it; it made everything glow as if it was touched by gold. She could almost see it. It brought with it a mood that she hadn't felt for so long that it was unfamiliar, and she welcomed it almost apprehensively: it was a quiet conviction, underlying every circumstance, that all was well and that the world was her true home, as if there were great secret powers that would see her safe.”
― Philip Pullman, The Secret Commonwealth