What would Gottfried Brande say? The only thing that counted for him was hard evidence that could be expressed in numbers. He'd have noo truck with the idea that something unreal could be real. Simon Talbot, on the other hand, thought that the distinction between real and unreal was a cultural construct, entirely dependent on the social and political context, with no permanent validity. (p55)

"It's a hard problem. There are some people so bad, all yoou can do is kill them." Lyra wondered if she agreed wtih that. (p469)

“Tilda, these openings between the worlds…” “Yes?” “Have you ever been through one?” “No. A sister of mine did once; in fact, two times. First time, she found a world where each kind of people hated every other kind. War, slavery, murder, jealousy, greed, anger—everyone angry all the time—hate for everything. She came away quickly. Then she went to another world where everyone loved everyone else. Kindness, patience, generosity, affection, tolerance. She came away even quicker. Too dull. Then she came home and fell in love with a Siberian hunter and forgot where the openings were.” (p481)

A young woman named Tamar Sharadze. She was a graduate of the University of Tblisi, a statistician and an expert on complex systems... (p 562)

“And just a few nights ago,” she went on, “on the ferry from Baku, I saw an angel again. I thought she was the same one as before, till she spoke. And I asked her what she thought the imagination meant, and the answer she gave showed me that she knew nothing about it either, nothing at all.” “What did she say?” said Malcolm. “She said that the imagination was just our minds making things up, bits of fantasy jumbled together, like a dream. But she was wrong. You see, angels…They don’t know what dreams are. They don’t make poetry or art. They don’t play. What Pan said, the thing he said I’d lost—he was right. It’s something fundamental. And I had lost it. So on that ferry from Baku I saw a bit more about what it was. It’s not something to do with good and evil, or good and bad, either. Angels might be good, and the Magisterium might do evil things, but they’re both wrong about this. Just…wrong. Like in the Arctic, when Pan and I saw that Dust must be good in spite of everyone saying it was bad. Here it was again, the same idea in a different form. It’s a sort of…” She clenched her hands, trying to find the right words. “They think that things can only be true or not true. But what you learn when you play, or tell stories, or in a dream, is that things can be both true and not true.”

“I think the Rose Field, the truth about things, isn’t just out there, it’s in here as well. And the imagination isn’t just in here, it’s out there too…The Rose Field needs what we have as much as we need what it has. What matters is that it must be free to flow through all the worlds. There was something Asta said once—incompleteness or something…A theorem…Someone’s theorem. 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. ”

“With the sickness here, people just seem indifferent. They’re not interested anymore. But it’s not just happening here. It’s every kind of bond, in our world as well. Like the new Master of Jordan, breaking the old connection between me and the college, because I was costing them too much. It sounded so reasonable when he said it. Money. They had to save money, because…Everything about the alkahest is reasonable. It’s reasonable to make money, to save money…It’s so powerful. Why have I never seen it before? It gets everywhere. Didn’t you tell me something about Thuringia Potash—they had a branch or a laboratory or something in Aleppo?” “That’s right. They’d just abandoned it because it was losing money. And that meant that all the things that depended on it had to go too. Jobs, businesses…There was a café where the TP staff used to eat. Going bankrupt.” “All being dissolved. The more I see, the more obvious it seems…I really think I’m beginning to understand at last. Everything having to give way to money.”

All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, .... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.