Secret Commonwealth Quotes

“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

“The question was, she thought, was the universe alive or dead?”
― Philip Pullman, The Secret Commonwealth

“The central question in the analysis of the UFO phenomenon has always been that of the controlling intelligence behind the objects' apparently purposeful behavior. For the time being, let me simply state again that the modern, global belief in flying saucers and their occupants is identical to an earlier belief in the Good People. The entities described as the pilots of the craft are indistinguishable from the elves, sylphs, and lutins of the Middle Ages. Through the observations of unidentified flying objects, we are concerned with an agency our ancestors knew well and regarded with awe: we are prying into the affairs of the Secret Commonwealth.”
― Jacques F. Vallée, Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact