The Rose Field Quotes

“without imagination you never see the truth about anything. Without imagination you think you see more truth, but in fact you see less. You know who”
― Philip Pullman, The Rose Field

“In any system, there are things you know are true, but you can’t prove that they are if you only use arguments from inside the system. Something like that.” “Gödel’s theorem. How does that fit in?” “Well, if that’s true, then it means that if you find a system that seems perfect and complete, where you can prove everything—then you’re wrong. You’re not looking properly. Because we need the gaps, you see? We need the holes where one world opens up to another. A system isn’t complete unless there’s a hole in it. We need the things we can’t explain, things we can’t prove, or else we die of suffocation.”
― Philip Pullman, The Rose Field

“Dreams are soaked with emotion”
― Philip Pullman, The Rose Field

“good people wanted to defeat evil ones”
― Philip Pullman, The Rose Field

“Every decision we make, anything we do, anything at all, determines what’ll happen after it.”
― Philip Pullman, The Rose Field

“People ought not to do that. To keep children from knowing things, I mean. They should tell the truth.”
― Philip Pullman, The Rose Field: The Book of Dust Volume Three

“When I see how much it troubles people—I mean, when they feel that something’s wrong with the world they live in, I feel sorry for them, but I can’t do much to help. I had a friend when I was an undergraduate who worried himself to death, literally; he killed himself. He was tormented by the question of whether he was real, and where his responsibility lay if he was unreal, and why he felt responsible if the world was empty of meaning, and what he could do about it… I felt so sorry for him, but I couldn’t understand anything about it. I was simple, and he was complicated, and I saw that that was a fundamental difference between us. I accepted the world as it was, and he didn’t. He was unhappy, and I was happy.”
― Philip Pullman, The Rose Field

“This is the wrong time of the year for leaves to behave like metaphors.”
― Philip Pullman, The Rose Field

“Suppose there was a shadow that wanted to see the sun, and suppose the sun had heard about shadows and wanted to see one of them. They’d never be able to. Either of them.”
― Philip Pullman, The Rose Field

“Well, you see, that’s interesting already. You mean, if it’s imagined, it can’t be real? What about the other way round: If it’s real, it can’t be imagined? They’re complete opposites. Is that what you mean?”
― Philip Pullman, The Rose Field

“What kindness and what good sense for them both to know that they were lovers only for a brief time and to remain friends!”
― Philip Pullman, The Rose Field

“My person, saw like that once. She saw everything and everyone in a light of gold. She saw correspondences and analogies and echoes and resemblances, so that nothing existed without a thousand connections to the world, and I saw them with her. For her the world was rich with meaning and alive with delight. Then little by little this way of seeing left her, so I set off to find it and bring it back.”
― Philip Pullman, The Rose Field

“As she looked up at him, he found he
could barely stand for the beating of his heart. He felt that the two of them
might have been the only focus of consciousness in the world, so fiercely
were they intent on each other.”
― Philip Pullman, The Rose Field

“What kindness, and what good sense for them both to know that they were lovers only for a brief time, and to remain friends.”
― Philip Pullman, The Rose Field

“You think that what matters in a dream is the story, the information, the content, you could say, and that it’s meaningless, because it makes no sense and fades and disappears. Of course it does, because the information is not what’s important. What matters most in a dream is the emotion that comes with it. Dreams are soaked with emotion, with fear, or longing, or love, or excitement, or sadness. They come to give us intense feeling, not information, and it lasts a very long time, long after the information, or the story, is blown away like dry leaves.”
― Philip Pullman, The Rose Field

“They think that things can only be true or not true. But what you learn when you play”
― Philip Pullman, The Rose Field

“all”
― Philip Pullman, The Rose Field

“Lyra”, she said, "how's Pan going to recognise your imagination, when he finds it?”
“I don’t know. It’s a metaphor.”
“Well I know that. But it worked, didn't it? I made you think, he was looking for something that had vanished. So you followed him.”
“Because I thought he might have been right. Something was missing.”
“What did you feel was missing?”
“A … certainty about the world. A sort of sense that fundamentally was true and reliable and just there. A sense that we belonged there too. Belonged in the physical world. Whatever that sense was, I’d had it once, and I didn’t have it any more.”
“Maybe imagination was the wrong word.”
“No, it was exactly the right word. People think imagination is just making things up, they’re just wrong. Even angels are wrong. Imagination is seeing things properly, real things, seeing them fully in all their context with all their connections in place, all the things they mean around them… The secret commonwealth.
p. 433”
― Philip Pullman, The Rose Field

“Something real, not imagination?” “Well, you see, that’s interesting already. You mean, if it’s imagined, it can’t be real? What about the other way round: If it’s real, it can’t be imagined? They’re complete opposites. Is that what you mean?”
― Philip Pullman, The Rose Field

“the poem of Jahan and Rukhsana: two lovers hand in hand entering a garden.”
― Philip Pullman, The Rose Field

“without imagination you never see the truth about anything. Without imagination you think you see more truth”
― Philip Pullman, The Rose Field

“This is what I know: without imagination you never see the truth about anything. Without imagination you think you see more truth”
― Philip Pullman, The Rose Field