It may have started or it may not have started. It was partly the town. Partly the place. Partly the forest and the old man’s Finnish religion, partly being a preacher’s kid, partly the old man’s northern obsessions, partly a combination of human beings and events, partly a genetic fix, an alchemy of circumstance.”
-- Perry (chapter 1)

Importance: Early in the novel, Perry walks to Pliney’s Pond, where his father once forced him to swim. There, he considers the nature of his relationship with home, family, and memory. His inability to pinpoint the exact inception of the undefinable “it” gestures towards the intermingled nature of the past and the present. A variety of places, attributes, and people swirl through Perry’s head, thereby emphasizing the way in which the past continually erupts into the present. In Northern Lights, history and memory are alive, vivid, and profoundly relevant.

They called it...
-- Narrator (chapter 2)