“Both the Oblation Board and the Specters of Indifference are bewitched by this truth about human beings: that innocence is different from experience. The Oblation Board fears and hates Dust, and the Specters feast on it, but it's Dust both of them are obsessed by.”

— Philip Pullman , His Dark Materials trilogy

Stanislaus Grumman to Lee Scoresby in Ch. 14 : Alamo Gulch
His Dark Materials, The Subtle Knife (1997)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Both the Oblation Board and the Specters of Indifference are bewitched by this truth about human beings: that innocence…" by Philip Pullman?

Philip Pullman 161

English author 1946

Related quotes

“Great contest follows, and much learned dust
Involves the combatants; each claiming truth,
And truth disclaiming both.”

William Cowper The Task

Source: The Task (1785), Book III, The Garden, Line 161.

“The various creation stories of ancient time were not scientific theories in any modern sense. They did not attempt to reveal anything new about the structures of the world; they aimed simply to remove the specter of the unknown from human imaginings.”

John D. Barrow (1952–2020) British scientist

Preface
The Origin of the Universe (1997)

“The point I would make is that the novelist and the historian are seeking the same thing: the truth — not a different truth: the same truth — only they reach it, or try to reach it, by different routes. Whether the event took place in a world now gone to dust, preserved by documents and evaluated by scholarship, or in the imagination, preserved by memory and distilled by the creative process, they both want to tell us how it was: to re-create it, by their separate methods, and make it live again in the world around them.”

Shelby Foote (1916–2005) Novelist, historian

Shelby Foote, The Civil War, A Narrative: Fort Sumter to Perryville (1958; reprint, New York: Vintage, 1986), 815. ISBN 0-394-74623-6.

“Communism was not the crazy fantasy of a few fanatics, nor the result of human stupidity and baseness; it was a real, very real part of the history of the twentieth century, and we cannot understand this history of ours without understanding communism. We cannot get rid of this specter by saying it was just “human stupidity,” or “human corruptibility.” The specter is stronger than the spells we cast on it. It might come back to life.”

Leszek Kolakowski (1927–2009) Philosopher, historian of ideas

Introduction to My Correct Views on Everything

“For I had expected always
Some brightness to hold in trust,
Some final innocence
To save from dust”

Stephen Spender (1909–1995) English poet and man of letters

"What I Expected Was" (l. 25–28). . .

“Isn’t every human being both a scientist and an artist; and in writing of human experience, isn’t there a good deal to be said for recognizing that fact and for using both methods?”

James Agee book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Source: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

“Most of humanity, he said, have eyes that are so caked shut with the dust of deception they will never see the truth, no matter who tries to help them.”

Elizabeth Gilbert book Eat, Pray, Love

Source: Eat, Pray, Love

“Truth also has its roof, and bed, and board.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

1830s, Literary Ethics (1838)
Context: Explore, and explore, and explore. Be neither chided nor flattered out of your position of perpetual inquiry. Neither dogmatise yourself, nor accept another's dogmatism. Why should you renounce your right to traverse the star-lit deserts of truth, for the premature comforts of an acre, house, and barn? Truth also has its roof, and bed, and board. Make yourself necessary to the world, and mankind will give you bread, and if not store of it, yet such as shall not take away your property in all men's possessions, in all men's affections, in art, in nature, and in hope.

“If the terrorists hated freedom, the Netherlands would be fucking dust.”

David Cross (1964) American comedian, writer and actor

It's Not Funny

“I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”

T.S. Eliot book The Waste Land

Source: The Waste Land (1922), Line 25 et seq.
Context: There is shadow under this red rock
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

“Both the Oblation Board and the Specters of Indifference are bewitched by this truth about human beings: that innocence is different from experience. The Oblation Board fears and hates Dust, and the Specters feast on it, but it's Dust both of them are obsessed by.”

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Philip Pullman 161

Related quotes

Related topics