Philip Pullman Quotes

181 quotes in 2513 categories

• Read like a butterfly, write like a bee.
• 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…
• 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…
• Symbols and emblems were everywhere. Buildings and pictures were designed to be read like books. Everything stood for something else; if you had the right…
• 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…
• 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…
• And then Serafina understood something for which the witches had no word: it was the idea of pilgrimage. She understood why these beings would wait…
• 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…
• Everything means something.
• Tolkien, who created this marvellous vehicle, doesn't go anywhere in it. He just sits where he is. What I mean by that is that he…
• 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.
• Then she was pressing her little proud broken self against his face, as close as she could get, and then they died.
• You going to be a scientist when you grow up?” That sort of question deserved a blank stare, which it got.
• 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…
• 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…
• And think what worrying does: has anyone ever added a single hour to the length of his life by worrying about it?
• There are some who live by every rule and cling tightly to their rectitude because they fear being swept away by a tempest of passion,…
• For a human being, nothing comes naturally,' said Grumman. 'We have to learn everything we do.
• 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…
• And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are. All we can say is…

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