We don’t need a list of rights and wrongs, tables of dos and don’ts: we need books, time, and silence. Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever.

Pullman contrasts moral instruction delivered as prohibitions (“Thou shalt not”) with the formative power of stories (“Once upon a time”). The quote argues that ethical imagination is cultivated less by rule-lists than by sustained engagement with literature—requiring the material access to books, the leisure to read them, and the inward space that silence provides. Stories, in this view, lodge in memory and shape empathy, judgment, and self-understanding over a lifetime, whereas bare commands are easily resisted or forgotten. It is also a defense of narrative as a moral technology: fiction does not merely entertain but trains readers to inhabit other perspectives and to think through consequences without being preached at.