The Secret Commonwealth Quotes

You're in a world full of color and you want to see it in black and white.

You won’t understand anything about the imagination until you realise that it’s not about making things up, it’s about perception.

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 ...

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.

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.

You won't understand anything about imagination until you realise that it's not about making things up, it's about perception.

Kai’s date to the Commonwealth’s ball last year, and it had been … terrifying. But also extraordinary. The people of Earth still weren’t sure what to do with the fact that one of their beloved leaders was not so secretly dating a Lunar, and a cyborg Lunar at that.

But then she remembered what the gyptians had said: Include things, don’t leave them out. Look at things in their context. Include everything.

Keep away from the literal-minded folk, and ignore the scoffers.

It was nothing more than what it was.

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.

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.

We need to imagine as well as measure.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

with his lumpish sow dæmon sprawled on the ground beside him, gnawing a turnip.

they have separated their intelligences from their other faculties. And that is not an intelligent thing to do.

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.

Then excuse me, Miss Silver, but they have separated their intelligences from their other faculties. And that is not an intelligent thing to do.

That’s interesting,” said Dr. Lieberson. “History’s not over, you see. It’s happening all the time.

What’s the secret commonwealth?” “The world of fairies, and ghosts, and the jacky lanterns.

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.

Have you ever heard the term ‘the secret commonwealth’ ?” “No. What does it refer to?” “To the world of half-seen things and half heard whispers. To things that are regarded by clever people as superstition. To fairies, spirits, hauntings, things of the night.

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.

What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! … The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires.

In Geneva, Olivier Bonneville was becoming frustrated.

Every thing possible to be believ’d is an image of truth. —William Blake

but knowing that she could do it wasn’t the same as being able to do it just then.

like a little thorn that catches for a moment on a traveler’s sleeve, only to pull out when the traveler walks on.

He’s saying that everything you know is going to change. Things that you are familiar with will become strange and alien, and things you have never imagined will become normal.

Or had she imagined it, and was her imagination just a spindrift of falsity?

All these things that are changing…like ice breaking under your feet.

maybe from other experiences as well, that there are more ways than one, more than two, of seeing things and perceiving their meanings.

She was not beautiful—she would never be that, nor pretty, nor conventionally attractive…

The strength was draining out of him minute by minute. Maybe he’d never move again.

In Malcolm’s view the story was almost insufferable,

She felt half inclined to lie down and die. But her body wanted food and drink, and she took this as a sign that her body at least wanted to go on living.

Jill, the time’s come. They’re going to close us down. Tell all the Heads of Section that Christabel is now in operation.

She felt light-headed, as if part of her were somewhere else and dreaming of this, and she’d wake up soon and find everything normal.

The magician arrived. He was called Johannes Agrippa, and he looked at us, at me and Dinessa, and went to my father’s study to talk in private.

La nature est un temple où de vivants piliers / Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles.

Ze zijn ingetogen in hun kleding, en hebben de houding van panters. Jij kunt dat. Je doet het al, alleen weet je het niet. - Farder Coram tegen Lyra

Dingen veranderen, Lyra. - Alice

De blik die hij zich zo goed herinnerde van toen hij haar lesgaf, die uitdrukking van blanco, ongenaakbaar verzet, schuilde achter haar ogen.

Ik wist niet eens dat u Alice heette. - Lyra

he sent a note to Lyra inviting her to dine with him in the Master’s lodging on the evening after the Founder’s Feast. She was a little puzzled, but not much concerned.

The Simurgh?

Le soleil noir de la Mélancolie.

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.

Marcel Delamare asked the question with enormous and unconcealed patience.

Leave it on the desk. Have you spoken to anyone else about this?” “No, monsieur.

Spirit is what matter does.

I am their father.

As darkness was falling at the edge of the Fens, rain started to fall too.

In the world of the spirits your name is famous.

The question was, she thought, was the universe alive or dead?

jeunesse dorée

But events have consequences, and sometimes the effects of what we once did take a long time to become fully apparent.

but he wondered how many others had seen the loneliness in her expression when she wasn’t guarding it.

Then she felt dizzy. This was all impossible, and it was all happening.

But just now she lacked inventiveness, or energy, or chutzpah. She was tired and lonely and frightened.

There were areas of her life about which she cared passionately and which he was indifferent to or simply unaware of.

Being invisible was hard work, unrewarding, soul-crushing work.

…and it would all go back to the way it used to be. At the same time, he knew it wouldn’t, but he had to hold on to something in the dark nights, and imagination was all he had.

But he was a human being, or part of one, and he felt just as Lyra did: unhappy, and guilty, and wretchedly lonely.

They gave her another image: she was enticing monsters out of the darkness of herself.

All she could do was hope, and she kept trying to do that in spite of the fear and loneliness.

Phantoms. Ghasts of this kind or that. Emissaries of the Evil One." "Do you believe that?" "Of course. It would be an intellectual failure to do anything else.

The meaning of something is its connection to something else

Thoughts that didn’t bear thinking kept crowding in and shouldering aside her pretended passivity.

He picked up a book that lay on the floor. “Are you reading this?” he said. It was Simon Talbot’s The Constant Deceiver. “Yes,” she said. “I’m not sure about it.” “That should please him.

Lives had been spent here—people had loved one another and eaten and drunk and laughed and betrayed and been afraid of death—and not a single fragment of that remained. White stones, black shadows.

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.

Lyra was so tired, she felt on the verge of delirium. She wanted to sleep quite desperately, but she knew that if she gave in and put her head down, she wouldn’t wake up till the morning was filling the sky.

…in a little adventure that had culminated in her thinking that everything meant something, if only she could read it. The universe had seemed alive then. There were messages to be read everywhere you looked.

But everyone will know...' 'So what? It's nothing to be ashamed of. Things happen to people's families all the time and it's not their fault. If you cope with it by being brave, people will admire you for it.

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.

Yes, the secret commonwealth…You don’t hear much talk about that these days. When I was young, there wasn’t a single bush, not a single flower nor a stone, that didn’t have its own proper spirit. You had to have a mind to your manners around them, to ask for pardon, or for permission, or give thanks….Just to acknowledge that they were there, them spirits, and they had their proper rights to recognition and courtesy.

I can’t do that anymore. That was just fancy. I was spinning tales out of the air, nothing more than that; there was nothing solid in them. Maybe Pan was right, and I haven’t got a real imagination. I was bullshitting.

Malcolm was watching everything, looking around unobtrusively, and as the speaker began again, he noticed something: the armed police had quietly vanished. There’d been a man at each of the six exits. Now there were none.

it must have been the case that there had been an angel among the hostages, that he’d struck down the leader as punishment for shooting the farmer, and then vanished, probably flown back to heaven.” “No doubt.” “Or to Calvi’s.

Since coming home to Oxford after that strange adventure, they had told no one about it, and exercised the most scrupulous care to keep it a secret; but sometimes, and more often recently, they simply had to get away from each other.

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.

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.

Well, she thought, what was the secret commonwealth, anyway? It was a state of being that had no place in the world of Simon Talbot, or the different world of Gottfried Brande. It was quite invisible to everyday vision. If it existed at all, it was seen by the imagination, whatever that was, and not by logic. It included ghosts, fairies, gods and goddesses, nymphs, night-ghasts, devils, jacky lanterns, and other such entities. They were neither well- nor ill-disposed to human beings by nature, but sometimes their purposes intersected or coincided with human ones. They had a certain power over human lives, but they could be defeated too, as the fairy of the Thames had been tricked by Malcolm when she had wanted to keep Lyra with her and not let her go….

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 so accusingly, as if it was something to blame her for. “I used to be young,” was all she could find to say.

Gradually, as Lyra watched, she found her mood lifting. 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. But now it was disappearing, like heavy gray clouds thinning and dispersing and finding their great banks of vapor drifting into wisps that wafted away into invisibility, leaving the sky clear and open.

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 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.

Maybe Pan was right, and I haven’t got a real imagination. I was bullshitting.” “You were what?” “That’s a word Mr. Scoresby taught me. He told me there were truth tellers, 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.

She lay there trying not to think, but thought was like a tide coming in. Little trickles of awareness—an essay to finish, her clothes that needed washing, the knowledge that unless she got to the hall by nine o’clock there’d be no breakfast—kept flowing in from this direction or that and undermining the sandcastle of her sleepiness. And then the biggest ripple yet: Pan and their estrangement. Something had come between them, and neither of them knew fully what it was, and the only person each could confide in was the other, and that was the one thing they couldn’t do.

We heard the United States had a new president, that she was arranging for a loan from the Commonwealth to bail us out. We heard the White House was burning and the National Guard was fighting the Secret Service in the streets of DC. We heard there was no water left in Los Angeles, that hordes of people were trying to walk north through the drought-ridden Central Valley. We heard that the county to the east of us still had electricity and that the Third World was rallying to send us support. And then we heard that China and Russia were at war and the US had been forgotten. Although the Fundamentalists' predictions of Armageddon grew more intense, and everyone else complained with increasing bitterness about everything from the last of chewing gum to the closure of Redwood General Hospital, still, among most people there was an odd sense of buoyancy, a sort of surreptitious relief, the same feeling Eva and I used to have every few years when the river that flows through Redwood flooded, washing out roads and closing businesses for a day or two. We knew a flood was inconvenient and destructive At the same time we couldn't help but feel a peculiar sort of delight that something beyond us was large enough to destroy the inexorability of our routines.

Ahead of her the dead bones of the town lay almost white in the moonlight. Lives had been spent here—people had loved one another and eaten and drunk and laughed and betrayed and been afraid of death—and not a single fragment of that remained. White stones, black shadows. All around her, things were whispering, or it might only have been night-loving insects conversing together. Shadows and whispers. Here was the tumbled ruins of a little basilica: people had worshipped here. Nearby a single archway topped with a classical pediment stood between nothing and nothing. People had walked through the arch, driven donkey carts through, stood and gossiped in its shade in the heat of a long-dead day…

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.

We are lovers of beauty without extravagance, and lovers of wisdom without unmanliness. Wealth to us is not mere material for vainglory but an opportunity for achievement; and poverty we think it no disgrace to acknowledge but a real degradation to make no effort to overcome.... Let us draw strength, not merely from twice-told arguments—how fair and noble a thing it is to show courage in battle—but from the busy spectacle of our great city's life as we have it before us day by day, falling in love with her as we see her, and remembering that all this greatness she owes to men with the fighter's daring, the wise man's understanding of his duty, and the good man's self-discipline in its performance—to men who, if they failed in any ordeal, disdained to deprive the city of their services, but sacrificed their lives as the best offerings on her behalf. So they gave their bodies to the commonwealth and received, each for his own memory, praise that will never die, and with it the grandest of all sepulchres, not that in which their mortal bones are laid, but a home in the minds of men, where their glory remains fresh to stir to speech or action as the occasion comes by. For the whole earth is a sepulchre of famous men; and their story is not graven only on stone over their native earth, but lives on far away, without visible symbol, woven into the stuff of other men's lives. For you now it remains to rival what they have done and, knowing the secret of happiness to be freedom and the secret of freedom a brave heart, not idly to stand aside from the enemy's onset.

Most would find it surprising to learn that America was consciously, intentionally, and specifically founded and formed after the pattern of ancient Israel. Its founders saw it as a new Israel, the Israel of the New World. It was their exodus from Europe like the Hebrew exodus from Egypt. The New World was their new promised land, and the Massachusetts Bay Colony was their New Jerusalem. As for the legal system of the new American commonwealth, the Puritans sought to incorporate the Law of Moses. They instituted a day of rest after the pattern of the Hebrew Sabbath. And the American holiday, Thanksgiving, was formed after the pattern of the Hebrew Sukkot, the Feast of Tabernacles. They named the mountains of America after the mountains of Israel: Mount Gilead, Mount Hermon, Mount Ephraim, Mount Moriah, Mount Carmel, and Mount Zion. They called their towns and cities, Jericho, Jordan, Salem, Canaan, Goshen, Hebron, and Beersheba. They named their children Joshua, Rachel, Ezra, Zechariah, Esther, Jeremiah, and a host of other names derived from the people of ancient Israel.

Strictly speaking, one never indulges in a gin before 5 p.m. Thankfully it’s always after 5 p.m. somewhere in the Commonwealth.

Now!’ Marvin interjected. ‘You must all be wondering why I invited you here. Well, you know why you’re here, Arthur; and I assume you’ve explained a little about the club to our members—’ ‘We’re looking at alternative truths, right?’ Bedivere asked. ‘The darker side to Britain, and all that.’ ‘Yes, yes, Bedivere, we shall cover that. We shall look at Europe, why we left and why ultimately the EU was disbanded; we shall look at the tragic situation in the United States, and we shall look at the abandonment of the Commonwealth states and the blight of Indonesia. But as well as that we shall also be looking closer to home, at our own histories, and I use the plural intentionally; at the rising rebels in the old Celtic countries, at the redefinition of New National Britain’s borders, and at our absolute ruler himself, George Milton, who thus far has used all his electoral power to claw hold of democratic immunity, whose Party has long since been a change-hand, change-face game of musical chairs with the same policies and people from one party to the next. This brings me to my former point of why I invited you here: because I believe that you three are the smartest, the most open, the most questioning, and that you will benefit most from hearing things from an alternative viewpoint—not always my own, and not always comfortable—that the three of you may one day take what you have learned here and remember it when the world darkens, and this country truly forgets that which it once was.’ There was a deep silence. Even Arthur, who was used to Marvin’s tangential speeches, was momentarily confounded, and in the quiet that followed he observed Bedivere to see what he thought of this side to their teacher. His eyes then slipped to Morgan, and he was surprised to find that she was transfixed. ‘But I must stress to all of you, it is my job at risk in doing this, my life at stake. So when you speak of this, speak only amongst yourselves, and tell no one what it is we discuss here. Understood?’ There was a series of dumbstruck nods of consent. Bedivere cleared his throat with a small cough. ‘And here I thought this was just going to be an extra-curricular history club,’ he joked.