Top 100 Pullman's Quotes
#1. AUGUST PULLMAN'S PRECEPT
Everyone deserves a standing ovation because we all overcometh the world.
Auggie
R.J. Palacio
#2. There are two trilogies I admire: Robertson Davies's 'The Deptford Trilogy' and Philip Pullman's 'His Dark Materials.'
Amy Bloom
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. But we can trust him Roger, I swear," she said with a final effort,"Because he's Will.
Philip Pullman
#6. The Lord of the Rings' is fundamentally an infantile work. Tolkien is not interested in the way grownup, adult human beings interact with each other. He's interested in maps and plans and languages and codes.
Philip Pullman
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. As for what it's against - the story is against those who pervert and misuse religion, or any other kind of doctrine with a holy book and a priesthood and an apparatus of power that wields unchallengeable authority, in order to dominate and suppress human freedoms.
Philip Pullman
#11. There's definitely a pattern of great British shows that get reinvented in America and do really well here, but I think 'Torchwood' is a bit different. It's more of a hybrid that doesn't exist as a reinvention.
Bill Pullman
#12. I like those crisis moments - if you're on top of it and don't get pulled under by panic and fear, it's a very bonding thing.
Bill Pullman
#13. 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
#14. The book is second only to the wheel as the best piece of technology human beings have ever invented. A book symbolises the whole intellectual history of mankind; it's the greatest weapon ever devised in the war against stupidity.
Philip Pullman
#15. She has committed great sins, but they've been forgiven, and that's why she loves so deeply.
Philip Pullman
#16. 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
#17. We don't need lists of rights and wrongs, tables of do's and don'ts: we need books, time, and silence.
Philip Pullman
#18. 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
#19. Rural towns aren't always idyllic. It's easy to feel trapped and be aware of social hypocrisy.
Bill Pullman
#20. 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
#21. My only real claim to anyone's attention lies in my writing.
Philip Pullman
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#27. 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
#28. I also turn down what's probably a good amount of coinage to be made out of playing dads, an incredible number of obnoxious dad.
Bill Pullman
#29. Claim whatever you want. Say you only want a happy family or a successful career or a big house. I say: no, that's not what you want. You'll settle for those things, but you really want a monkey that does your evil bidding. Pullman is a genius just for this.
Maureen Johnson
#30. Playing the president is interesting because, unlike a lot of different roles, people pay so close attention to who the president is, all of them, everybody's got an opinion about the president.
Bill Pullman
#31. 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
#32. It's only through honesty and courage that science can work at all. The Ptolemaic understanding of the solar system was undermined and corrected by the constant pressure of more and more honest reporting.
Philip Pullman
#33. The justice of it seems to children correct and right - I mean, we laugh at it! We underestimate children's ability to know what is a story and what isn't.
Philip Pullman
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. He's [Jesus] the most fascinating character in history, really - the character who's made more difference to the world than anyone since him. I daresay that Muslims would say Muhammad was that character, but I think Jesus had a sort of 600-year start on him.
Philip Pullman
#37. It's not my business to remedy deaths! It's my business to tell stories. Lyra and the other heroines didn't come with placards saying, "Make this a feminist story!" I'm glad people enjoy seeing a female protagonist in a big adventure story, but I didn't do it for political reasons.
Philip Pullman
#38. 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
#41. Listen! We're not just doing this for the money! We're doing this for a S*** LOAD of money!
Bill Pullman
#42. And before I'd got to the end of the first paragraph, I'd come up slap bang against a fundamental problem that still troubles me today whenever I begin a story, and it's this: where am I telling it from?
Philip Pullman
#43. I've never touched Auggie Pullman, it's only because I've never had a reason to - that's all!) Nobody
R.J. Palacio
#44. There's a hunger for stories in all of us, adults too. We need stories so much that we're even willing to read bad books to get them, if the good books won't supply them.
Philip Pullman
#45. Doesn't it scare you having your death close by all the time?" said Lyra. "Why ever would it? If he's there, you can keep an eye on him. I'd be a lot more nervous not knowing where he was.
Philip Pullman
#46. This is a different kind of knowing. ... It's like understanding, I suppose. ...
Philip Pullman
#47. There's another difference between us, Mr. Scoresby. A witch would no sooner give up flying than give up breathing. To fly is to be perfectly ourselves.
Philip Pullman
#48. On THE AMBER SPYGLASS:
If this plotline was a motorist, it would have been arrested for driving while intoxicated, if it had not perished in the horrible drunk accident where it went headlong over the cliff of the author's preachy message, tumbled down the rocky hillside, crashed, and burned.
John C. Wright
#49. He dared to do what men and women don't even dare to think. And look what he's done already: he's torn open the sky, he's opened the way to another world. Who else has ever done that? Who else could think of it?
Philip Pullman
#50. I know whom we must fight ... it is the Church. For all its history, it's tried to suppress and control every natural impulse.That is what the Church does, and every church is the same: control, destroy, obliterate every good feeling.
Philip Pullman
#51. Because the great thing about fairy tales and folk tales is that there is no authentic text. It's not like the text of Paradise Lost or James Joyce's Ulysses, and you have to adhere to that exact text.
Philip Pullman
#52. Foreign diplomats could have modeled their conduct on the way the Negro postmen, Pullman porters, and dining car waiters of Roxbury [Massachusetts] acted, striding around as if they were wearing top hats and cutaways.
Malcolm X
#53. Anyone who doesn't laugh has something on their conscience, you can be sure of that.
- from: 'The Twelve Brothers
Philip Pullman
#54. Well, I can do certain jobs because smells don't bother me. But that means I'm usually the one at the ranch cleaning up all the manure.
Bill Pullman
#55. Mrs. George Widener was met not by automobile but by a special train - consisting of a private Pullman, another car for ballast, and a locomotive.
Walter Lord
#56. We measure the value of a civilized society by the number of Libraries it opens, not the number it closes down.
Philip Pullman
#57. There's a point you get to on the stage where you're not remembering lines but living them, and you reach this pure moment which, really, is more intense than what you can achieve in life.
Bill Pullman
#58. Tell them stories. They need the truth you must tell them true stories, and everything will be well, just tell them stories.
Philip Pullman
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. Just sort of relax your mind and say yes, it does hurt, I know. Don't try and shut it out.
Philip Pullman
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. Just finished 'Secrecy' - truly enthralling both as a love story and as a tale of suspense - but much more than both.
Philip Pullman
#65. In the United States 'First' and 'Second' class can't be painted on railroad cars, for all passengers, being Americans, are equal and it would be 'unAmerican.' But paint 'Pullman' on a car and everyone is satisfied.
Owen Wister
#66. Was there only one world after all which spent its time dreaming of others?
Philip Pullman
#67. 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
#68. I am a religious person, although I am not a believer.
Philip Pullman
#69. We have to build the Republic of Heaven where we are, because for us, there is no elsewhere.
Philip Pullman
#70. Theater has always been most important to my psyche.
Bill Pullman
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#76. 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
#77. I don't know where I belong, so I'm free. No one's got a hold on me.
Philip Pullman
#78. 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
#79. If I have to die to do what's proper, then I will, and be happy while I do.
Philip Pullman
#80. When it comes to telling children stories, they don't need simple language. They need beautiful language.
Philip Pullman
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. And think what worrying does: has anyone ever added a single hour to the length of his life by worrying about it?
Philip Pullman
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.
Philip Pullman
#88. For a long time I thought I was a poet, but that's a high title to claim.
Philip Pullman
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. As I remember, the first real poem I wrote was about the wheat fields between Spokane and Pullman, to the south.
Carolyn Kizer
#94. 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
#95. they could discuss without quarreling and cooperate without getting in each other's way,
Philip Pullman
#96. Argue with anything else, but don't argue with your own nature.
Philip Pullman
#98. Behind them lay pain and death and fear; ahead of them lay doubt, and danger, and fathomless mysteries.
Philip Pullman
#99. 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
#100. 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
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