Humanists

"Lyra has a part to play in all this, and a major one. The irony is that she must do it all without realizing what she's doing. She can be helped, though, and if my plan with the Tokay had succeeded, she would have been safe for a little longer. I would have liked to spare her a journey to the North."

"His (C. S. Lewis's) work is not frivolous in the way that Tolkien is frivolous, though it seems odd to call a novel of great intricacy and enormous popularity frivolous. I just don’t like the conclusions Lewis comes to, after all that analysis, the way he shuts children out from heaven, or whatever it is, on the grounds that the one girl is interested in boys. She’s a teenager! Ah, it’s terrible: Sex — can’t have that. And yet I respect Lewis more than I do Tolkien."

"Lyra and her dæmon moved through the darkening hall, taking care to keep to one side, out of sight of the kitchen."

"On an unseasonably, uncomfortably, unnaturally warm day in mid-October I sit here trying not to think about global warming. But it's difficult. Is this fear going to pass away like the other fears I remember — nuclear war, overpopulation leading to mass starvation, the hole in the ozone layer, acid rain? Well, those problems haven't gone away exactly. The new one just seems bigger than all the rest."

"They’re often bracketed together, Tolkien and Lewis, which I suppose is fair because they were great friends — both Oxford writers and scholars, both Christians. Tolkien’s work has very little of interest in it to a reader of literature, in my opinion. When I think of literature — Dickens, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad — the great novelists found their subject matter in human nature, emotion, in the ways we relate to each other. If that’s what Tolkien’s up to, he’s left out half of it. The books are wholly male-oriented. The entire question of sexual relationships is omitted."

"Her dæmon's name was Pantalaimon, and he was currently in the form of a moth, a dark brown one so as not to show up in the darkness of the hall."

"How can I just go and sit in the library or somewhere and twiddle my thumbs, knowing what's going to happen? I don't intend to do that, I promise you."

"Being a practiced liar doesn't mean you have a powerful imagination. Many good liars have no imagination at all; it's that which gives their lies such wide-eyed conviction."

"I knew I was telling a story that would be gripping enough to take readers with it, and I have a high enough opinion of my readers to expect them to take a little difficulty in their stride. My readers are intelligent: I don't write for stupid people. Now mark this carefully, because otherwise I shall be misquoted and vilified again — we are all stupid, and we are all intelligent. The line dividing the stupid from the intelligent goes right down the middle of our heads. Others may find their readership on the stupid side: I don't. I pay my readers the compliment of assuming that they are intellectually adventurous."

"I have said that His Dark Materials is not fantasy but stark realism, and my reason for this is to emphasise what I think is an important aspect of the story, namely the fact that it is realistic, in psychological terms. I deal with matters that might normally be encountered in works of realism, such as adolescence, sexuality, and so on; and they are the main subject matter of the story — the fantasy (which, of course, is there: no-one but a fool would think I meant there is no fantasy in the books at all) is there to support and embody them, not for its own sake."

"I'm trying to write a book about what it means to be human, to grow up, to suffer and learn. My quarrel with much (not all) fantasy is it has this marvellous toolbox and does nothing with it except construct shoot-em-up games. Why shouldn't a work of fantasy be as truthful and profound about becoming an adult human being as the work of George Eliot or Jane Austen? Well, there are a few fantasies that are. One of them is Paradise Lost."

"“We are all subject to the fates. But we must all act as if we are not,” said the witch, “or die of despair.”"

"“That is how it seems....But we can’t read the darkness, Mr. Scoresby. It is more than possible that I might be wrong.”"

"But as the wave expended its force and the waters withdrew, the bleak rocks remained; there was no arguing with fate; neither his despair nor Lyra’s had moved them a single inch."

"“What work have I got to do, then?” said Will, but went on at once, “No, on second thought, don’t tell me. I shall decide what I do. If you say my work is fighting, or healing, or exploring, or whatever you might say, I'll always be thinking about it. And if I do end up doing that, I'll be resentful because it’ll feel as if I didn’t have a choice, and if I don’t do it, I'll feel guilty because I should. Whatever I do, I will choose it, no one else.” “Then you have already taken the first steps toward wisdom,” said Xaphania."

"[about Northern Lights] Pullman let us down. This book is here because it deals with moral/political complexities with unsentimental respect for its (young adult) readers and characters. Explores freedom and social agency, and the question of using ugly means for emanicipatory ends. It raises the biggest possible questions, and doesn’t patronise us that there are easy answers. The second in the trilogy, The Subtle Knife, is a perfectly good bridging volume… and then in book three, The Amber Spyglass, something goes wrong. It has excellent bits, it is streets ahead of its competition… but there’s sentimentality, a hesitation, a formalism, which lets us down. Ah well. Northern Lights is still a masterpiece."

"If you're going to make a living at this business - more importantly, if you're going to write anything that will last - you have to realise that a lot of the time, you're going to be writing without inspiration. The trick is to write just as well without it as with. Of course, you write less readily and fluently without it; but the interesting thing is to look at the private journals and letters of great writers and see how much of the time they just had to do without inspiration. Conrad, for example, groaned at the desperate emptiness of the pages he faced; and yet he managed to cover them. Amateurs think that if they were inspired all the time, they could be professionals. Professional know that if they relied on inspiration, they'd be amateurs."

"Everything has a meaning, if only we could read it."

"All these tattered old bits and pieces have a history and a meaning. A group of them together can seem like the traces left by an ionizing particle in a bubble chamber: they draw the line of a path taken by something too mysterious to see. That path is a story, of course. What scientists do when they look at the line of bubbles on the screen is work out the story of the particle that made them: what sort of particle it must have been, and what caused it to move in that way, and how long it was likely to continue. Dr. Mary Malone would have been familiar with that sort of story in the course of her search for dark matter. But it might not have occurred to her, for example, when she sent a postcard to an old friend shortly after arriving in Oxford for the first time, that that card itself would trace part of a story that hadn't yet happened when she wrote it. Perhaps some particles move backward in time; perhaps the future affects the past in some way we don't understand; or perhaps the universe is simply more aware than we are. There are many things we haven't yet learned how to read. The story in this book is partly about that very process."

"Chapter: Every Indication of Inadvertant Solitude I think it's fair to guess that most of Richard Dawkins' many readers are not using The Selfish Gene and its successors as textbooks to help them pass science exams. That he is a highly distinguished scientist is not in question, but many scientists have achieved great distinction - and indeed written textbooks - without once writing a popular best-seller."

"Nobody has to read this book. Nobody has to pick it up. Nobody has to open it. And if they open it and read it, they don't have to like it. And if you read it and you dislike it, you don't have to remain silent about it. You can write to me, you can complain about it, you can write to the publisher, you can write to the papers, you can write your own book. You can do all those things, but there your rights stop. No one has the right to stop me writing this book. No one has the right to stop it being published, or sold, or bought, or read."

"'Magisterium' and 'oblation' are church terms, they are terms of church organisation. These are administrative things. These are bureaucratic things. How can an attack on those be construed as an attack on God? These are human things which human beings have constructed in order to wield power. That's not a contentious thing to say. That is simply true. These are forms of political organisation and no more than that."

"Now here are these children who have gone through great adventures and learned wonderful things and would therefore be in a position to do great things to help other people. But they're taken away. He doesn't let them. For the sake of taking them off to a perpetual school holiday or something, he kills them all in a train crash. I think that's ghastly. It's a horrible message."

"A sense of belonging, a sense of being part of a real and important story, a sense of being connected to other people, to people who are not here any more, to those who have gone before us. And a sense of being connected to the universe itself. All those things were promised and summed up in the phrase, 'The Kingdom of Heaven'. But if the Kingdom is dead, we still need those things. We can't live without those things because it's too bleak, it's too bare and we don't need to. We can find a way of creating them for ourselves if we think in terms of a Republic of Heaven. This is not a Kingdom but a Republic, in which we are all free and equal citizens, with — and this is the important thing — responsibilities. With the responsibility to make this place into a Republic of Heaven for everyone. Not to live in it in a state of perpetual self-indulgence, but to work hard to make this place as good as we possibly can."

"This book contains a story and several other things. The other things might be connected with the story, or they might not; they might be connected to stories that haven't appeared yet. It's not easy to tell."

"And then what?" said her Dæmon sleepily "build what?" "The Republic of Heaven."

"I have stolen ideas from every book I have ever read. My principle in researching a novel is 'Read like a butterfly, write like a bee', and if this story contains any honey, it is entirely because of the quality of the nectar I found in the work of better writers."

"I remember. He meant the Kingdom was over, the Kingdom of Heaven, it was all finished. We shouldn’t live as if it mattered more than this life in this world, because where we are is always the most important place." "He said we had to build something…" "That’s why we needed our full life, Pan... we wouldn’t have been able to build it. No one could if they put themselves first. We have to be all those difficult things like cheerful and kind and curious and patient, and we’ve got to study and think and work hard, all of us, in all our different worlds, and then we’ll build…"

"I'm caught between the words 'atheistic' and 'agnostic'. I've got no evidence whatever for believing in a God. But I know that all the things I do know are very small compared with the things that I don't know. So maybe there is a God out there. All I know is that if there is, he hasn't shown himself on earth. But going further than that, I would say that those people who claim that they do know that there is a God have found this claim of theirs the most wonderful excuse for behaving extremely badly. So belief in a God does not seem to me to result automatically in behaving very well."

"When you look at organised religion of whatever sort — whether it's Christianity in all its variants, or whether it's Islam or some forms of extreme Hinduism — wherever you see organised religion and priesthoods and power, you see cruelty and tyranny and repression. It's almost a universal law."

"Most uncompromising was Day's informing vision of society's complete and utter dependency on the military-industrial complex. In a modern military state like the U.S., Day considered, there was really no such thing as a "civilian population." Everyone who participated in the economy was implicated in militaristic enterprises, if only as a consumer or a taxpayer: "... so that you are, in effect, helping to support the state's preparations for war exactly to the extent of your attachment to worldly things of whatever kind" (By Little, III). Hence, a life of voluntary poverty for Day represented not only Christian piety, but an essential strategy for diminishing each individual's complicity with the military-industrial nexus."

"Predictably, Day's views on sexuality became much more conservative after her conversion to Catholicism. As a young woman, Day had attended Emma Goldman's lectures on sexual liberation in Greenwich Village, Even at the time, the older Day claims, she was "revolted by such promiscuity" (57). In 1931, when Goldman's autobiography Living My Life was published, Day actually refused to read Goldman's account of her long series of love affairs, "because I was offended in my sex" (Long Loneliness, 17). Day clearly had no sympathy with or understanding for Goldman's conception of sexual liberation as integral to full political liberation: "Men who are revolutionaries, I thought, do not dally on the side as women do, complicating the issue by an emphasis on the personal" (57). Day later felt deeply ashamed of her only novel, The Eleventh Virgin (1924), an autobiographical account of her early radical years, and actually tried to suppress the novel in the years after her conversion by buying up and destroying copies, until a priest to whom she went to confession pointed out the futility of this enterprise. While very radical in her views on communitarianism, pacifism, and the labor movement, and deeply sympathetic to the left-wing revolutionary movements around the world, Day could be conservative-even reactionary-in her treatment of those who offended her conservative sexual morality."

"Asked in a 1973 interview on public television what she thought of women's liberation, she responded by talking in the most general of terms about the importance of working for social change through "local politics.""

"Even the Cuban revolution, which many anarchists regarded with mistrust for the Marxist-Leninist character it gradually assumed over the years Day regarded as a hopeful sign of awakening of popular consciousness, a victory for justice in no way incompatible with Catholic faith. "God bless the priests and people of Cuba," she wrote in 1961. "God bless Castro and all those who are seeing Christ in the poor" (By Little, 298- 302). On the other hand, she well understood the corrupting tendency toward bureaucratic centralism inherent in classic Marxism-Leninism. The rule of the Bolsheviks under Lenin, as Day pointed out, became a dictatorship of the "great mass of dispossessed industrial workers... in name only; it was to become a dictatorship by the elite few, by the members of the party" (Long Loneliness, 84). Nearer to home, she took a stand on the struggles of less radical U.S. workers' organizations. She believed that the right to strike for a better wage was more than merely compatible with Catholic faith-it was "a good impulse-one could even say an inspiration of the Holy Spirit." Strikers were, she considered, "trying to uphold their right to be treated not as slaves, but as men" (By Little, 24)."

"While in jail for her part in the White House suffrage picketing and on hunger strike, Day began reading the Bible, and found relief in the reading from her intense physical and emotional distress. It was then, Day writes, that she began to think of her political activism in religious terms: "If we had faith in what we were doing, making our protest against brutality and injustice, then we were indeed casting our seeds, and there was promise of the harvest to come. ... I prayed and did not know that I prayed" (Long Loneliness, 78)."

"What Day brought to the Catholic Worker movement-drastically modifying it-were her political radicalism and her interest in active struggle for social justice"

"To be merely a journalistic observer of social injustice, Day considered to help in organizing work, to donate to relief funds, or even to pledge oneself to voluntary poverty for life "so that you can share with your brothers" (and Day did all of these)-was still insufficient. One must live with the needy and oppressed, "share with them their sufferings. Give up one's privacy..." (Long Loneliness, 210)."

"Who is a revolutionary woman? A revolutionary woman wants change, not mere cosmetic change but change to the status quo, and she is willing to sacrifice to make this happen. We have some extraordinary examples: Sojourner Truth, Las Adelitas, Frida Kahlo, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Dorothy Day, Malala Yousafzai, Coretta Scott King, and others."

"Dorothy Day lived a very simple life and believed in nonviolence."

"No force could sway her. No fear could stop her."

"Dorothy, the oldest girl, is the nut of the family. When she came out of the university she was a Communist. Now she's a Catholic crusader. She owns and runs a Catholic paper and skyhoots all over the country, delivering lectures. She has one girl in a Catholic school and is separated from her husband."

"In Floyd Dell's recollections, the Day of the Masses period was a heedless young freethinker, an adherent of the bohemian lifestyle."

"Even during her Greenwich Village years, while Day was living what she would later refer to as her "disorderly" life, she was reading Tolstoi and finding herself "thoroughly in sympathy with the Christianity he expressed, the Christianity that dispensed with a church and a priesthood.""

"[atomic bombs are] born not that men might live, but that men might be killed."

"The papers list the scientists (the murderers) who are credited with perfecting this new weapon."

"Today's paper with its columns of description of the new era, the atomic era, which this colossal slaughter of the innocents has ushered in, is filled with stories covering every conceivable phase of the new discovery."

"I too complain ceaselessly in my heart and in my words too. My very life is a protest. Against government, for instance."

"While here in the western hemisphere, we went in for precision bombing (what chance of precision bombing now?) while we went in for obliteration bombing, Russia was very careful not to bomb cities, to wipe out civilian populations. Perhaps she was thinking of the poor, of the workers, as brothers."

"The diocesan papers are full of stories about atrocities in China and the sufferings of the Church and I get a letter from Betty Chang from Tientsin about the communes and the full-employment, etc. When we see the migrant camps, and our factories in the fields, our system does not offer much."

"For some weeks now my problem is this: What to do about the open immorality (and of course I mean sexual morality) in our midst. It is like the last times--there is nothing hidden that shall not be revealed.... We have one young [prostitute], drunken, promiscuous, pretty as a picture, college educated, mischievous, able to talk her way out of any situation--so far. She comes to us when she is drunk and beaten and hungry and cold and when she is taken in, she is liable to crawl into the bed of any man on the place. We do not know how many she has slept with on the farm. What to do? What to do?"