Top 100 Philip Pullman Quotes
#1. Princess, princess, youngest daughter,
Open up and let me in!
Or else your promise by the water
Isn't worth a rusty pin.
Keep your promise, royal daughter,
Open up and let me in!
Philip Pullman
#2. I don't like rats any more than the next bloke, but they ain't wicked and cruel like people can be. They're just ratty in their habits.
Philip Pullman
#3. I am a religious person, although I am not a believer.
Philip Pullman
#4. Was there only one world after all which spent its time dreaming of others?
Philip Pullman
#5. Just sort of relax your mind and say yes, it does hurt, I know. Don't try and shut it out.
Philip Pullman
#6. If you want to write anything that works, you have to go with the grain of your talent, not against it. If your talent is inert and sullen in the face of business or politics ... but takes fire at the thought of ghosts and vampires and witches and demons then feed the flames, feed the flames.
Philip Pullman
#7. Everyone, from the Mother Superior to the priests to my parents
they were so upset and reproachful ... I felt as if something they all passionately believed in depended on me carrying on with something I didn't.
Philip Pullman
#8. Tell them stories. They need the truth you must tell them true stories, and everything will be well, just tell them stories.
Philip Pullman
#9. We measure the value of a civilized society by the number of Libraries it opens, not the number it closes down.
Philip Pullman
#10. I don't know where I belong, so I'm free. No one's got a hold on me.
Philip Pullman
#11. To get the best out of life here ... Good grief. There's plenty of it about, so indulge. Give yourself some thing to remember. Fall in love. Fall out of love. Gamble. Get drunk. See how long you can stay awake. Go for long walks at night. Discover what you're afraid of doing, and then do it.
Philip Pullman
#12. That's the duty of the old, to be anxious on behalf of the young. And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old.
Philip Pullman
#13. When it comes to telling children stories, they don't need simple language. They need beautiful language.
Philip Pullman
#15. If I have to die to do what's proper, then I will, and be happy while I do.
Philip Pullman
#16. And then what?" said her daemon sleepily. "Build what?"
"The Republic of Heaven," said Lyra.
Philip Pullman
#18. My flat's about half a mile away, and you know what I'd like most of all in the world? I'd like a cup of tea. Come on, let's go and put the kettle on.
Philip Pullman
#19. But I know that all the things I do know are very small compared with the things that I don't know
Philip Pullman
#20. A genuine scientist would love the subject for itself; I think I love science for the stories that are told about it.
Philip Pullman
#21. If there is a war to be fought, we don't consider cost one of the factors in deciding whether or not to fight.
Philip Pullman
#23. A lot of modernism does seem to come out of a fear of being thought an ordinary storyteller. So they tell it backwards and they tell it in the present tense and they cut loose the pages and shuffle them around - all that kind of stuff.
Philip Pullman
#24. Whatever happened behind now was simply that: behind. Lyra had left it. She felt she was leaving the world altogether, so remote and intent she was, so high they were climbing, so strange and uncanny was the light that bathed them.
Philip Pullman
#25. Take the anchor, there. The first meaning of that is hope, because hope holds you fast like an anchor so you don't give way.
Philip Pullman
#27. your reading will be even better then, after a lifetime of thought and effort, because it will come from conscious understanding. Grace attained like that is deeper and fuller than grace that comes freely, and furthermore, once you've gained it, it will never leave you.
Philip Pullman
#29. A professional writer is someone who writes just as well when they're not inspired as when they are.
Philip Pullman
#30. Thou shalt not might' reach the head but it takes 'Once upon a time' to reach the heart. Also: We need stories so much that we're even willing to read bad books to get them.
Philip Pullman
#31. Lyra has never seen such a sight, never heard such a bellow; it was like a mountain laughing.
Philip Pullman
#32. Truly," he said, "I am dead ... I'm dead, and I'm going to Hell ... " "Hush," said Lyra, "we'll go together.
Philip Pullman
#33. We don't need lists of rights and wrongs, tables of do's and don'ts: we need books, time, and silence.
Philip Pullman
#34. I don't profess any religion; I don't think it's possible that there is a God; I have the greatest difficulty in understanding what is meant by the words 'spiritual' or 'spirituality.'
[Interview, The New Yorker, Dec. 26, 2005]
Philip Pullman
#35. And barely ten minutes later the soft sound of wingbeats came to their ears, and Balthamos stood up eagerly. The next moment, the two angels were embracing, and Will, gazing into the flames, saw their mutual affection. More than affection: they loved each other with a passion.
Philip Pullman
#37. mr. makepeace, do you really turn lead into gold?"
"no, of course not. no one can do that. but if people think you're foolish enough to try, they don't bother to look at what you're really doing. they leave you in peace.
Philip Pullman
#38. She has committed great sins, but they've been forgiven, and that's why she loves so deeply.
Philip Pullman
#39. Make a noise in there and I won't help you. You're on your own.
Philip Pullman
#40. You think things have to be possible? Things have to be true !
Philip Pullman
#41. One curious thing about growing up is that you don't only move forward in time; you move backwards as well, as pieces of your parents' and grandparents' lives come to you.
Philip Pullman
#43. Men pass in front of our eyes like butterflies, creatures of a brief season. We love them; they are brave, proud, beautiful, clever; and they die almost at once. They die so soon that our hearts are continually racked with pain.
Philip Pullman
#44. The evening sky was awash with peach, apricot, cream: tender little ice-cream clouds in a wide orange sky.
Philip Pullman
#45. One moment several things are possible, the next moment only one happens, and the rest don't exist. Except that other worlds have sprung into being, on which the did happen.
Philip Pullman
#48. For that reason you can't write with music playing, and anyone who says he can is either writing badly, or not listening to the music, or lying. You need to hear what you're writing, and for that you need silence.
Philip Pullman
#49. A human being with no daemon was like someone without a face, or with their ribs laid open and their heart torn out; something unnatural and uncanny that belonged to the world of nightghasts, not the waking world of sense.
Philip Pullman
#50. But Iorek and Iofur were more than just two bears. There were two kinds of beardom opposed here, two futures, two destinies. Iofur had begun to take them in one direction, and Iorek would take them in another, and in the same moment, one future would close forever as the other began to unfold.
Philip Pullman
#51. Blake said Milton was a true poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it. I am of the Devil's party and know it.
Philip Pullman
#53. When you live for many hundreds of years, you know that every opportunity will come again.
Philip Pullman
#54. Make this the golden rule, the equivalent of the Hippocratic oath: Everything we ask a child to do should be worth doing.
Philip Pullman
#56. O stars, isn't it from you that the lover's desire for the face of his beloved arises? Doesn't his secret insight into her pure features come from the pure constellations? - from "The Third Elegy" by Rainer Maria Rilke Fine
Philip Pullman
#57. You going to be a scientist when you grow up? That sort of question deserved a blank stare, which it got.
Philip Pullman
#58. Tony ate the rest of his pie and drank the sweet hot liquor without taking much notice of his surroundings, and the surroundings took little notice of him: he was too small to be a threat, and too stolid to promise much satisfaction as a victim. It
Philip Pullman
#60. It was such a strange tormenting feeling when your daemon was pulling at the link between you; part physical pain deep in the chest, part intense sadness and love. Everyone tested it when they were growing up: seeing how far they could pull apart, coming back with intense relief.
Philip Pullman
#61. I think we need to tell each other everything we've found out. And it'll take us a good long time, and we might as well keep our hands busy while we're doing it, so
Philip Pullman
#62. No,' he said, 'memory's a poor thing to have. It's your own real hair and mouth and arms and eyes and hands I want. I didn't know I could ever love anything so much ...
Philip Pullman
#63. It's like having to make a choice: a blessing or a curse. The one thing you can't do is choose neither.
Philip Pullman
#64. Thou Shalt Not is soon forgotten, but Once Upon a Time is forever.
Philip Pullman
#65. But think of Adam and Eve like an imaginary number, like the square root of minus one: you can never see any concrete proof that it exists, but if you include it in your equations, you can calculate all manner of things that couldn't be imagined without it.
Philip Pullman
#66. But we can trust him Roger, I swear," she said with a final effort,"Because he's Will.
Philip Pullman
#67. That is a question with too complicated an answer.
Philip Pullman
#68. True education flowers at the point when delight falls in love with responsibility.
Philip Pullman
#69. There's been terrible things we seen, en't there? And more a coming, more'n likely. So I think I'd rather not know what's in the future. I'll stick to the present.
Philip Pullman
#70. The Specters feast as vampires feast on blood, but the Specters' food is attention. A conscious and informed interest in the world. The immaturity of children is less attractive to them.
Philip Pullman
#71. Sticks and stones, I'll break yer bones, but names ain't worth a quarrel.
Philip Pullman
#72. Lyra felt herself moving into a kind of trance beyond sleep and waking: a state of conscious dreaming, almost, in which she was dreaming that she was being carried by bears to a city in the stars. She
Philip Pullman
#73. Nothing is more likely to drive listeners away than a ponderous interpretation of what they've just marvelled at.
Philip Pullman
#74. Finally, and almost simultaneously, the children discovered what it was like to be drunk. "Do they like doing this?" gasped Roger, after vomiting copiously. "Yes," said Lyra, in the same condition. "And so do I," she added stubbornly. Lyra
Philip Pullman
#75. I was connected to God like that, and because he was there, I was connected to the whole of his creation.
Philip Pullman
#76. She was learning that if she pretended to be weak and frightened, and dabbed at her eyes with a lacy handkerchief, she could turn aside all manner of pressing questions.
Philip Pullman
#78. There is another consequence of any belief in a single god, and that is that it is a very good excuse for people to behave very badly.
Philip Pullman
#79. We are all subject to the fates. But we must act as if we are not, or die of despair.
Philip Pullman
#80. What I do say is that I can write verse, and that the writing of verse in strict form is the best possible training for writing good prose.
Philip Pullman
#81. We love them; they are brave, proud, beautiful, clever; and they die almost at once. They die so soon that our hearts are continually racked with pain. We
Philip Pullman
#82. I was born in Norwich in 1946, and educated in England, Zimbabwe, and Australia, before my family settled in North Wales.
Philip Pullman
#84. I thought physics could be done to the glory of God, till I saw there wasn't any God at all and that physics was more interesting anyway. The Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake, that's all.
Philip Pullman
#85. That's the duty of the old,' said the Librarian, 'to be anxious on the behalf of the young. And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old.'
They sat for a while longer, and then parted, for it was late, and they were old and anxious.
Philip Pullman
#86. Everything has a meaning, if only we could read it.
Philip Pullman
#87. Do you think I need anything else?" "You could do with some sense," came the reply. "Some faculty to enable you to recognize wisdom and incline you to respect and obey it.
Philip Pullman
#88. A story, to me, has a particular sprite, like the angel of the spirit of that story - and it's my job to attend to what it wants to do.
Philip Pullman
#89. The powers of this world are very strong. Men and women are moved by tides much fiercer than you can imagine, and they sweep us all up into the current. Go well, Lyra; bless you, child, bless you. Keep your own counsel.
Philip Pullman
#90. Lee was too cool by nature to rage at fate; his manner was to raise an eyebrow and greet it laconically.
Philip Pullman
#92. Maybe so," he said, "but whatever little chance of safety there is, I want her to have it.
Philip Pullman
#93. The wave function of this situation is going to collapse quite soon.
Philip Pullman
#94. Swathed in an old tweed coat on which the damp had settled like a thousand tiny pearls.
Philip Pullman
#95. Maybe art itself was a kind of voodoo, possessing you, giving you supernatural power, letting you see in the dark.
Philip Pullman
#96. Maybe sometimes we don't do the right thing because the wrong thing looks more dangerous, and we don't want to look scared, so we go and do the wrong thing just because it's dangerous. We're more concerned with not looking scared than with judging right.
Philip Pullman
#97. the history of human life has been a struggle between wisdom and stupidity. She and the rebel angels, the followers of wisdom, have always tried to open minds; the Authority and his churches have always tried to keep them closed.
Philip Pullman
#98. I will love you for ever, whatever happens. Till I die and after I die, and when I find my way out of the land of the dead I'll drift about forever, all my atoms, till I find you again ...
Philip Pullman
#99. Her father was lying back in his chair, lazy and powerful, his eyes as fierce as his daemon's. She didn't love him, she couldn't trust him, but she had to admire him, and the extravagant luxury he'd assembled in this desolate wasteland, and the power of his ambition.
Philip Pullman
#100. Does he think the job of a librarian is so simple, so empty of content, that anyone can step up and do it for a thank-you and a cup of tea? Does he think that all a librarian does is to tidy the shelves?
Philip Pullman
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