Philip Pullman Quotes & Sayings

For a long time I thought I was a poet, but that's a high title to claim. — Philip Pullman

You think things have to be possible? Things have to be true ! — Philip Pullman

All the stories of the Bible that I know came to me first from my grandfather's lips. He would see stories in everything. He told stories very easily and very generously, so I loved him for that. He was a simple man, a Victorian; he was born in 1890-something. He saw no reason and had never seen any reason to question his Christian faith. His faith was strong and simple and that's it. And I, like his other grandchildren and the children in his parish, sheltered underneath it. — Philip Pullman

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

Keep your powder dry. — Philip Pullman

He was never the creator. He was an angel like ourselves - the first angel, true, the most powerful, but he was formed of Dust as we are, and Dust is only a name for what happens when matter begins to understand itself. Matter loves matter. It seeks to know more about itself, and Dust is formed. — Philip Pullman

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

and she saw a bed of lamb's lettuce, or rapunzel. — Philip Pullman

Life is hard, Mr. Scoresby, but we cling to it all the same." "And this journey we're on? Is that folly or wisdom?" "The greatest wisdom I know. — Philip Pullman

Shame to die with one bullet left, though. — Philip Pullman

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

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

And then my uncle killed him anyway just to teach him a lesson. — Philip Pullman

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

I've been surprised by how little
criticism I've got. Harry Potter's been taking all the flak. I'm a great fan of
J.K. Rowling, but the people - mainly from America's Bible Belt - who complain that
Harry Potter promotes Satanism or witchcraft obviously haven't got enough in
their lives. Meanwhile, I've been flying under the radar, saying things that
are far more subversive than anything poor old Harry has said. My books are
about killing God. — Philip Pullman

The idea hovered and shimmered delicately, like a soap bubble, and she dared not even look at it directly in case it burst. But she was familiar with the way of ideas, and she let it shimmer, looking away, thinking about something else. — Philip Pullman

You speak of destiny as if it was fixed. — Philip Pullman

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

She felt loose and free and light in a universe without purpose. — Philip Pullman

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

She did not move. Nor did she scream or faint; her only actions were to draw back the hem of her dress from where it brushed the shiny dome of his skull and to breathe deeply, several times, with her eyes shut. Her father had taught her this as a remedy for panic. He had taught her well; it worked. — Philip Pullman

You going to be a scientist when you grow up? That sort of question deserved a blank stare, which it got. — Philip Pullman

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

She had asked: What is he? A friend or an enemy?
The alethiometer answered: He is a murderer.
When she saw the answer, she relaxed at once. He could find food, and show her how to reach Oxford, and those were powers that were useful, but he might still have been untrustworthy or cowardly. A murderer was a worthy companion. She felt as safe with him as she'd done with Iorek Byrnison the armoured bear. — Philip Pullman

We've heard them all talk about Dust, and they're so afraid of it, and you know what? We believed them, even though we could see that what they were doing was wicked and evil and wrong ... We thought Dust must be bad too, because they were grown up and they said so. But what if it isn't? What if it's - '
She said breathlessly, 'Yeah! What if it's really good ... — Philip Pullman

Lyra marveled at the effect hope could have. — Philip Pullman

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

Thou Shalt Not is soon forgotten, but Once Upon a Time is forever. — Philip Pullman

Who was that?" said Will, trembling, facing the two angels. "That was Metatron," said Balthamos. — Philip Pullman

Where no light shone from the iron-dark sky, and where a mist obscured the horizon on every side. The ground was bare earth, beaten flat by the pressure of millions of feet, even though those feet had less weight than feathers; so it must have been time that pressed it flat, even though time had been stilled in this place; so it must have been the way things were. This was the end of all places and the last of all worlds. — Philip Pullman

It was a jaw cracking, lung-bursting yawn that lasted almost a minute. — Philip Pullman

there is an angel called Metatron. — Philip Pullman

All she knew was that she must be in love with someone, or she wouldn't feel so miserable. — Philip Pullman

the particular plant longed for by the wife, which was originally parsley, was a well-known abortifacient. — Philip Pullman

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

The Authority considers that conscious beings of every kind have become dangerously independent, so Metatron is going to intervene much more actively in human affairs. — Philip Pullman

Disney is a huge presence when it comes to fairy tales because he's made of them such brilliant artifacts in terms of movie-making. But it's very hard to ignore what he's done to them.I'm not interested in denigrating Disney or even commenting on him very much. I'm more interested in seeing what I can do with the stories myself. — Philip Pullman

Oh, I find whatever you do a source of perpetual fascination. — Philip Pullman

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

A genuine scientist would love the subject for itself; I think I love science for the stories that are told about it. — Philip Pullman

You are a cesspit if moral filth. — Philip Pullman

I want to fight, Becky. Can you understand that? I want struggle, I want danger. You know, Sally said something to me once: we were talking about happiness and what that might mean. She said she didn't want to be /happy/, that was a weak, passive sort of thing; she wanted to be alive and active. She wanted /work/. That's the spirit I like. That's what I want; and my work is a rough dirty dangerous kind of work. Oh, I want other things too. I want to write a play and see Henry Irving perform in it. I want to swank about town smoking Havanas and have supper with pretty girls in the Cafe Royal. I want to play poker on a Mississippi riverboat. I want to see Dan Goldberg get into Parliament. I want to see you go to university and get a first-class degree. Sally ... Sally can do anything we wants, by me. There's a whole world I want, Becky. — Philip Pullman

After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world. — Philip Pullman

The moment in the account of Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis is when they realize they're naked and try and cover themselves with fig leaves. That seemed to me a perfect allegory of what happened in the 20th century with regard to literary modernism. Literary modernism 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? ... a lot of modernism does seem to come out of a fear of being thought an ordinary storyteller. — Philip Pullman

I don't know where I belong, so I'm free. No one's got a hold on me. — Philip Pullman

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

In writing like this, he was letting truth from beyond time into history, and thus making history the handmaid of posterity and not its governor ... — Philip Pullman

I told him I was going to betray you, and betray Lyra, and he believed me because I was corrupt and full of wickedness; he looked so deep I felt sure he'd see the truth. But I lied too well. I was lying with every nerve and fiber and everything I'd ever done ... I wanted him to find no good in me, and he didn't. There is none. — Philip Pullman

People are too complicated to have simple labels. — Philip Pullman

Somewhere in the garden a nightingale was singing, and a little breeze touched her hair and stirred the leaves overhead. All the different bells of the city chimed, once each, this one high, that one low, some close by, others farther off, one cracked and peevish, another grave and sonorous, but agreeing in all their different voices on what the time was, even if some of them got to it a little more slowly than others. In that other Oxford where she and Will had kissed good-bye, the bells would be chiming, too, and a nightingale would be singing, and a little breeze would be stirring the leaves in the Botanic Garden ... — Philip Pullman

There is a correspondence between the microcosm and the macrocosm! The stars are alive, child! Did you know that? Everything out there is alive, and there are grand purpose abroad! The universe is full of intentions, you know. Everything happens for a purpose. — Philip Pullman

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

Read like a butterfly, write like a bee. — Philip Pullman

If we all gave all our goods to the poor, the church would fall apart. If we all hated our father and mother, as Jesus told us to, there'd be an end of the church's emphasis on the family as being the one important thing holding the whole society together. There are all sorts of ways in which the church's teachings contradict directly what Jesus says in the Gospel. — Philip Pullman

Men and women are moved by tides much fiercer than you can imagine, and they sweep us all up into the current. — Philip Pullman

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

If I'm reading something I happen to know and gets it wrong, I just don't trust the book any more. What I ask of a novel I'm reading is that it should know a fraction more about the things I know than I do. When I'm writing ... I ask myself: would I be convinced by this if I read it? If I knocked against this bit of scenery, would it feel solid? — Philip Pullman

There's some that came here never believing they were dead. They insisted all the way that they were alive, it was a mistake, someone would have to pay; made no difference. There's others who longed to be dead when they were alive, poor souls; lives full of pain or misery; killed themselves for a chance of a blessed rest, and found that nothing had changed except for the worse, and this time there was no escape; you can't make yourself alive again. — Philip Pullman

Behind her the sun was still shining, so that every grove and every single tree between her and the storm blazed ardent and vivid, little frail things defying the dark with leaf and twig and fruit and flower. — Philip Pullman

The world is a cruel place sometimes, and warm-hearted people do most of the good in it. And much of the time, they're mocked and scorned for their pains. — Philip Pullman

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

Like all fundamentalists who get their clammy hands on the levers of power, the market fanatics are going to kill off every humane, life-enhancing, generous, imaginative and decent corner of our public life ... Market fundamentalism, this madness that's infected the human race, is like a greedy ghost that haunts the boardrooms and council chambers and committee rooms from which the world is run these days. The greedy ghost understands profit all right. But that's all. What he doesn't understand is enterprises that don't make a profit, because they're set up to do something different. He doesn't understand libraries at all ... — Philip Pullman

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

Half a dozen brats turned with expressions of derision, and Lyra threw her cigarette down, recognizing the cue for a fight. Everyone's daemon instantly became warlike: each child was accompanied by fangs, or claws, or bristling fur, and Pantalaimon, contemptuous of the limited imaginations of these gyptian daemons, became a dragon the size of a deer hound. — Philip Pullman

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

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

I wanted to avoid what some modern tellers have done, quite legitimately, to make fairy tales more like novels and short stories, to characterize the heroes and the heroines much more than they are characterized in Grimm. I like the psychological flatness of them, the fact that they're more like masks than individuals. — Philip Pullman

There will be days when the stuff is not flowing freely. What you do then is MAKE IT UP! — Philip Pullman

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

Tell them stories. They need the truth you must tell them true stories, and everything will be well, just tell them stories. — Philip Pullman

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

A graduate of Oxford University with a degree in — Philip Pullman

War is the sea I swim in and the air I breathe. — Philip Pullman

Argue with anything else, but don't argue with your own nature. — Philip Pullman

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

If a coin comes down heads, that means that the possibility of its coming down tails has collapsed. Until that moment the two possibilities were equal.
But on another world, it does come down tails. And when that happens, the two worlds split apart. — Philip Pullman

Fine vapors escape from whatever is doing the living. The night is cold and delicate and full of angels Pounding down the living. The factories are all lit up, The chime goes unheard. We are together at last, though far apart. - from "The Ecclesiast" by John Ashbery — Philip Pullman

Once upon a time lasts forever — Philip Pullman

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

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

Lyra wanted to talk to the bear, and if he had been human, she would already be on familiar terms with him; but he was so strange and wild and cold that she was shy, almost for the first time in her life. So as he loped along, his great legs swinging tirelessly, she sat with the movement and said nothing. Perhaps he preferred that anyway, she thought; she must seem a little prattling cub, only just past babyhood, in the eyes of an armored bear.
She had seldom considered herself before, and found the experience interesting but uncomfortable, very like riding the bear, in fact. — Philip Pullman

Why do they do these things to children, Pan? Do they all hate children so much, that they want to tear them apart like this? Why do they do it? — Philip Pullman

I got a book token for Christmas and exchanged it for a book called A History of Art, and that book (which I still have-battered and falling to pieces) became more precious to me than any Bible. — Philip Pullman

Tirelessly they flew on and on, and tirelessly she kept pace. She felt a fierce joy possessing her, that she could command these immortal presences. And she rejoiced in her blood and flesh, in the rough pine bark she felt next to her skin, in the beat of her heart and the life of all her senses, and in the hunger she was feeling now, and in the presence of her sweet-voiced bluethroat daemon, and in the earth below her and the lives of every creature, plant and animal both; and she delighted in being of the same substance as them, and in knowing that when she died her flesh would nourish other lives as they had nourished her. — Philip Pullman

Like a wave that has been building it's strength over a thousand miles of ocean, and which makes little stir in the deep water, but which, when it reaches the shallows rears itself high up into the sky, terrifying the shore dwellers, before crashing down on land with irresistible power - so Iorek Byrnison rose up against Iofur, exploding upward from his firm footing on the dry rock and slashing with a ferocious left hand at the exposed jaw of Iofur Raknison. — Philip Pullman

My only real claim to anyone's attention lies in my writing. — Philip Pullman

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

Lee saw the fireball and head through the roar in his ears Hester saying, "That's the last of 'em Lee."
He said, or thought, "Those poor men didn't have to come to this, nor did we."
She said, "We held 'em off. We held out. We're a-helping Lyra."
Then she was pressing her little proud broken self against his face, as close as she could get, and then they died. — Philip Pullman

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

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

Lonely? I don't know. They tell me this is cold. I don't know what cold is, because I don't freeze. So I don't know what lonely means either. Bears are made to be solitary. — Philip Pullman

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

Just sort of relax your mind and say yes, it does hurt, I know. Don't try and shut it out. — Philip Pullman

conscious only of his movement upward, the last of Lee Scoresby passed through the heavy clouds and came out under the brilliant stars, where the atoms of his beloved daemons, Hester, were waiting for him. — Philip Pullman

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

Every atom of me and every atom of you. — Philip Pullman

She was riding a bear! And the Aurora was swaying above them in golden arcs and loops, and all around was the bitter Arctic cold and the immense silence of the North. — Philip Pullman

And Pantalaimon didn't ask why, because he knew; and he didn't ask whether Lyra loved Roger more than him, because he knew the true answer to that, too. And he knew that if he spoke, she wouldn't be able to resist; so the daemon held himself quiet so as not to distress the human who was abandoning him, and now they were both pretending that it wouldn't hurt, it wouldn't be long before they were together again, it was all for the best. But Will knew that the little girl was tearing her heart out of her breast. — Philip Pullman

You cannot change what you are, only what you do. — Philip Pullman

It might have been a new way for her heart to beat. — Philip Pullman