Top 100 Philip Pullman Quotes
#1. There are two trilogies I admire: Robertson Davies's 'The Deptford Trilogy' and Philip Pullman's 'His Dark Materials.'
Amy Bloom
#2. I've always loved what I'd term 'dark fiction' writers, everyone from J. G. Ballard to Mervyn Peake and Philip Pullman. I'm not sure it's a genre, but it's what I like best.
Christopher Fowler
#3. Themes that are "too large for adult fiction can only be dealt with adequately in a children's book" - Philip Pullman
(Hunt and Lenz, 2001, p. 122 as cited by Hunt, 2005, p. 204)
Philip Pullman
#4. In the 1970s and 1980s there was so little decent fiction for young people, but we're now in a golden age that shows no sign of fading. Philip Pullman, J. K. Rowling, Lemony Snicket are only three of the best known among a good number of equals.
David Mitchell
#5. Everything about this is embarrassing" she said. "D'you know how embarrassing it is to mention good and evil in a scientific laboratory? Have you any idea? One of the reasons I became a scientist was not to have to think about that kind of thing.
Philip Pullman
#7. 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
#8. For every once upon a time there must be a story to follow, because if a story doesn't, something else will, and it might not be as harmless as a story.
Philip Pullman
#9. Iorek Byrnison: Can is not the same as must.
Lyra Silvertongue: But if you must and you can, then there's no excuse.
Philip Pullman
#10. 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
#11. We have to build the Republic of Heaven where we are, because for us, there is no elsewhere.
Philip Pullman
#12. I am a religious person, although I am not a believer.
Philip Pullman
#13. I have maintained a passionate interest in education, which leads me occasionally to make foolish and ill-considered remarks alleging that not everything is well in our schools.
Philip Pullman
#14. Was there only one world after all which spent its time dreaming of others?
Philip Pullman
#15. Just finished 'Secrecy' - truly enthralling both as a love story and as a tale of suspense - but much more than both.
Philip Pullman
#16. A few minutes after he arrived, Lee was talking to a group of astronomers eager to learn what news he could bring them, for there are few natural philosophers as frustrated as astronomers in a fog.
Philip Pullman
#17. We feel cold, but we don't mind it, because we will not come to harm. And if we wrapped up against the cold, we wouldn't feel other things, like the bright tingle of the stars, or the music of the aurora, or best of all the silky feeling of moonlight on our skin. It's worth being cold for that.
Philip Pullman
#18. Just sort of relax your mind and say yes, it does hurt, I know. Don't try and shut it out.
Philip Pullman
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. Tell them stories. They need the truth you must tell them true stories, and everything will be well, just tell them stories.
Philip Pullman
#22. We measure the value of a civilized society by the number of Libraries it opens, not the number it closes down.
Philip Pullman
#23. Anyone who doesn't laugh has something on their conscience, you can be sure of that.
- from: 'The Twelve Brothers
Philip Pullman
#24. Being a practiced liar doesn't mean you have a powerful imagination. Many good liars have no imagination at all; it's that which gives their lies such wide-eyed conviction.
Philip Pullman
#25. He let her do it, then looked around for his fingers. There they were, curled like a bloody quotation mark on the lead. He laughed.
Philip Pullman
#26. Behind them lay pain and death and fear; ahead of them lay doubt, and danger, and fathomless mysteries.
Philip Pullman
#28. Argue with anything else, but don't argue with your own nature.
Philip Pullman
#29. they could discuss without quarreling and cooperate without getting in each other's way,
Philip Pullman
#30. So they had language, and they had fire, and they had society. And about then she found an adjustment being made in her mind, as the word creatures became the word people. These beings weren't human, but they were people, she told herself; it's not them, they're us. They
Philip Pullman
#32. We shouldn't live as if [other worlds] mattered more than this life in this world, because where we are is always the most important place.
Philip Pullman
#33. There is time, and there is what is beyond time. There is darkness, and there is light. There is the world and the flesh, and there is God.
Philip Pullman
#34. I don't know where I belong, so I'm free. No one's got a hold on me.
Philip Pullman
#35. For a long time I thought I was a poet, but that's a high title to claim.
Philip Pullman
#36. After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.
Philip Pullman
#37. The figure in front threw back his hood. He had a face the sentry knew, but he gave the password anyway and said, "We found him at the sulphur lake. Says his name is Baruch. He's got an urgent message for Lord Asriel." The
Philip Pullman
#38. Just be yourself. You don't have to put on an act."
"To be myself, I have to put on an act," Ginny said bitterly.
"What's that mean?"
"It means I don't know who I am.
Philip Pullman
#39. And think what worrying does: has anyone ever added a single hour to the length of his life by worrying about it?
Philip Pullman
#40. once or twice the two of them shared a glimpse of meaning that felt as if a shaft of sunlight had struck through clouds to light up a majestic line of great hills in the distance - something far beyond, and never suspected.
Philip Pullman
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. When it comes to telling children stories, they don't need simple language. They need beautiful language.
Philip Pullman
#44. And remember this: take the hard road, not the easy one. The road that leads to life is a hard one, and it passes through a narrow gate, but the road to destruction is easy, and the gate is broad. Plenty take the easy road; few take the hard one. Your job is to find the hard one, and go by that.
Philip Pullman
#46. Shame on you! Think what this child has done! You might not have more courage, but you should be ashamed to show less.
Philip Pullman
#47. No one has the right to live without being shocked.
Philip Pullman
#48. If I have to die to do what's proper, then I will, and be happy while I do.
Philip Pullman
#49. And then what?" said her daemon sleepily. "Build what?"
"The Republic of Heaven," said Lyra.
Philip Pullman
#50. The first ghost to leave the world of the dead was Roger. He took a step forward, and turned to look back at Lyra, and laughed in surprise as he found himself turning into the night, the starlight, the air ... and then he was gone, leaving behind such a vivid little burst of happiness.
Philip Pullman
#52. Literary modernism kind of grew out of a sense that, "Oh my god! I'm telling a story! Oh, that can't be the case, because I'm a clever person. I'm a literary person! What am I going to do to distinguish myself? I know! I'll write Ulysses."
Philip Pullman
#53. Oh, I find whatever you do a source of perpetual fascination.
Philip Pullman
#55. She was afraid of John Faa, and what she was most afraid of was his kindness.
Philip Pullman
#56. Will considered what to do. When you choose one way out of many, all the ways you don't take are snuffed out like candles, as if they'd never existed. At the moment all Will's choices existed at once. But to keep them all in existence meant doing nothing. He had to choose, after all.
Philip Pullman
#57. 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
#58. Much ingenious interpretation of story is little more than seeing pleasing patterns in the sparks of a fire, but it does no harm.
Philip Pullman
#59. Looking at them now, thought Jim, you'd never believe they weren't in love with each other, and not with a hopeless, doomed obsession like poor Isabel Meredith. This was what love ought to be like: playful and passionate and teasing, and dangerous, too, with sharp intelligence in it.
Philip Pullman
#60. But I know that all the things I do know are very small compared with the things that I don't know
Philip Pullman
#61. She longed for cutlasses, pistols, and brandy; she had to make do with coffee, and pencils, and verbs.
Philip Pullman
#62. If a witch offers you her love,you should take it. If you don't it's your own fault if bad things happen to you ...
Philip Pullman
#63. A genuine scientist would love the subject for itself; I think I love science for the stories that are told about it.
Philip Pullman
#64. 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
#67. 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
#69. I write almost always in the third person, and I don't think the narrator is male or female anyway. They're both, and young and old, and wise and silly, and sceptical and credulous, and innocent and experienced, all at once. Narrators are not even human - they're sprites.
Philip Pullman
#70. All stories teach, whether the storyteller intends them to or not. They teach the world we create. They teach the morality we live by. They teach it much more effectively than moral precepts and instructions.
Philip Pullman
#71. Religion grants its adherents malign, intoxicating and morally corrosive sensations. Destroying intellectual freedom is always evil, but only religion makes doing evil feel quite so good.
Philip Pullman
#72. 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
#73. 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
#75. The fairy tale is in a perpetual state of becoming and alteration. To keep to one version or one translation alone is to put robin redbreast in a cage.
Philip Pullman
#76. The e-book revolution has made it very easy to pay writers a good deal less than what their work is worth. I do strongly believe that we writers ought to hold out for much better royalties.
Philip Pullman
#77. Who was that?" said Will, trembling, facing the two angels. "That was Metatron," said Balthamos.
Philip Pullman
#78. When you choose one way out of many, all the ways you don't take are snuffed out like candles, as if they'd never existed.
Philip Pullman
#79. You don't read it in the sense of reading a message; it doesn't work like that. What's happening is that the Shadows are responding to the attention you pay them.
Philip Pullman
#80. It does not make sense. It cannot exist. It's impossible, and if it isn't impossible, it's irrelevant, and if it isn't either of those things, it's embarrassing.
Philip Pullman
#81. This is the value for me of writing books that children read. Children aren't interested in your appalling self-consciousness. They want to know what happens next. They force you to tell a story.
Philip Pullman
#83. Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit.
Philip Pullman
#84. Besides, if you want to write something perfect, write a haiku. Anything longer is bound to have a few passages that don't work as well as they might.
Philip Pullman
#86. What I couldn't help noticing was that I learned more about the novel in a morning by trying to write a page of one than I'd learned in seven years or so of trying to write criticism.
Philip Pullman
#89. 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
#90. I had passed through the entire British education system studying literature, culminating in three years of reading English at Oxford, and they'd never told me about something as basic as the importance of point of view in fiction!
Philip Pullman
#91. Tell him, we are not devils but we have friends who are.
Philip Pullman
#92. Stories are the most important thing in the world. Without stories, we wouldn't be human beings at all.
Philip Pullman
#93. I am a strong believer in the tyranny, the dictatorship, the absolute authority of the writer.
Philip Pullman
#94. Men and women are moved by tides much fiercer than you can imagine, and they sweep us all up into the current.
Philip Pullman
#95. Good and Evil are names for what people do, not for what they are ... stopped believing there was a power of good and evil. That they were outside of us ... People are too complicated for labels.
Philip Pullman
#96. Human beings can't see anything without wanting to destroy it. That's original sin. And I'm going to destroy it. Death is going to die.
Philip Pullman
#97. There will be days when the stuff is not flowing freely. What you do then is MAKE IT UP!
Philip Pullman
#98. My only real claim to anyone's attention lies in my writing.
Philip Pullman
#100. But he might have had a bang on the head!" said Joan. "Poor little boy, he thinks he was a rat!"
"Hmm," said the receptionist, and wrote rodent delusion on a pink slip of paper.
Philip Pullman
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