Pullman Quotes & Sayings

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 always seems to be looking backwards, to a greater and more golden past; and what's more he doesn't allow girls or women any important part in the story at all. Life is bigger and more interesting than The Lord of the Rings thinks it is. — Philip Pullman

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

She found out that having something to do prevented you from feeling seasick, and that even a job like scrubbing a deck could be satisfying, if it was done in a seamanlike way. She was very taken with this notion, and later on she folded the blankets on her bunk in a seamanlike way, and put her possessions in the closet in a seamanlike way, and used 'stow' instead of 'tidy' for the process of doing so. After two days at sea, Lyra decided that this was the life for her. — Philip Pullman

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

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

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

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

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

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

The writers are pretty political and they want to get as big an audience as they can - they want the popular vote. — Bill Pullman

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

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

Powell to say: " 'I wish I was blacker. I'd like to be as black as you are, Miles.'"(3) — Peter 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

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

I'm perfectly happy about being superstitious and atheistic. — Philip Pullman

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

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

Being in love was like China: you knew it was there, and no doubt it was very interesting, and some people went there, but I never would. I'd spend all my life without ever going to China, but it wouldn't matter, because there was all the rest of the world to visit. — Philip Pullman

Stories don't teach us to be good; it isn't as simple as that. They show us what it feels like to be good, or to be bad. They show us people like ourselves doing right things and wrong things, acting bravely or acting meanly, being cruel or being kind, and they leave it up to our own powers of empathy and imagination to make the connection with our own lives. Sometimes we do, sometimes we don't. It isn't like putting a coin in a machine and getting a chocolate bar; we're not mechanical, we don't respond every time in the same way ...
The moral teaching comes gently, and quietly, and little by little, and weighs nothing at all. We hardly know it's happening. But in this silent and discreet way, with every book we read and love, with every story that makes its way into our heart, we gradually acquire models of behaviour and friends we admire and patterns of decency and kindness to follow.
Philip Pullman from his Award Lecture, Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award Recipient 2005 — Philip Pullman

She wondered whether there would ever come an hour in her life when she didn't think of him
didn't speak to him in her head, didn't relive every moment they'd been together, didn't long for his voice and his hands and his love. She had never dreamed of what it would feel like to love someone so much; of all the things that had astonished her in her adventures, that was what astonished her the most. She thought the tenderness it left in her heart was like a bruise that would never go away, but she would cherish it forever. — Philip Pullman

Make this the golden rule, the equivalent of the Hippocratic oath: Everything we ask a child to do should be worth doing. — Philip Pullman

Friends ... They come to your house and they know your parents and. ... Sometimes a boy might ask me around to his house, and I might go or I might not, but I could never ask him back. So I never had friends, really. I would have liked ... I had my cat, — Philip Pullman

I co-own the ranch with my brother, and he and his wife are really the backbone of the operation. — Bill Pullman

And think what worrying does: has anyone ever added a single hour to the length of his life by worrying about it? — Philip Pullman

And Will knew what it was to see his daemon. As she flew down to the sand, he felt his heart tighten and release in a way he never forgot. Sixty years and more would go by, and as an old man he would still feel some sensations as bright and fresh as ever: Lyra's fingers putting the fruit between his lips under the gold-and-silver trees; her warm mouth pressing against his; his daemon being torn from his unsuspecting breast as they entered the world of the dead; and the sweet rightfulness of her coming back to him at the edge of the moonlight dunes. — 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

Perhaps some particles move backward in time; perhaps the future affects the past in some way we don't understand; or perhaps the universe is simply more aware than we are. — 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

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

The ultimate source is probably the tendency in some of us, part of our psychological inheritance from our far-distant ancestors, the tendency to look for extreme solutions, absolute truths, abstract answers. All fanatics and fundamentalists share this tendency, which is so alien and unpleasing to the rest of us. The theory says they must do such-and-such, so they do it, never mind the human consequences, never mind the social cost, never mind the terrible damage to the fabric of everything decent and humane.
I'm afraid these fundamentalists of one sort or another will always be with us. We just have to keep them as far away as possible from the levers of power. — Philip Pullman

I'm superstitious about the paper that I use, for example. I've written all my novels on a paper of a particular size with lines of a particular distance apart and with two holes in the paper for the folder clip. — Philip Pullman

I'm trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief ... I'm not in the business of offending people. I find the books upholding certain values that I think are important, such as life is immensely valuable and this world is an extraordinarily beautiful place. We should do what we can to increase the amount of wisdom in the world.
[Washington Post interview, 19 February 2001] — Philip Pullman

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

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

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

And for most of that time, wisdom has had to work in secret, whispering her words, moving like a spy through the humble places of the world while the courts and palaces are occupied by her enemies. — Philip Pullman

When you look at what C.S. Lewis is saying, his message is so anti-life, so cruel, so unjust. The view that the Narnia books have for the material world is one of almost undisguised contempt. At one point, the old professor says, 'It's all in Plato' - meaning that the physical world we see around us is the crude, shabby, imperfect, second-rate copy of something much better. I want to emphasize the simple physical truth of things, the absolute primacy of the material life, rather than the spiritual or the afterlife.

[The New York Times interview, 2000] — Philip Pullman

The intentions of a tool are what it does. A hammer intends to strike, a vise intends to hold fast, a lever intends to lift. They are what it is made for. But sometimes a tool may have other uses that you don't know. Sometimes in doing what you intend, you also do what the knife intends, without knowing. — Philip Pullman

Ruta Skadi was four hundred and sixteen years old, with all the pride and knowledge of an adult witch queen. She was wiser by far than any short-lived human, but she had not the slightest idea of how like a child she seemed beside these ancient beings. Nor did she know how far their awareness spread out beyond her like filamentary tentacles to the remotest corners of universes she had never dreamed of; nor that she saw them as human-formed only because her eyes expected to. If she were to perceive their true form, they would seem more like architecture than organism, like huge structures composed of intelligence and feeling.
But they expected nothing else: she was very young. — 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

People should decide on the books' meanings for themselves. They'll find a story that attacks such things as cruelty, oppression, intolerance, unkindness, narrow-mindedness, and celebrates love, kindness, open-mindedness, tolerance, curiosity, human intelligence. — Philip Pullman

I have stolen ideas from every book I have ever read. — Philip Pullman

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

But we can trust him Roger, I swear," she said with a final effort,"Because he's Will. — Philip Pullman

Life is hard ... but we cling to it all the same — Philip Pullman

Her upbringing had given her an independence of mind that made her more like a girl of today than one of her own time - which was why she had walked out, and why she was not daunted by the prospect of being alone. — Philip Pullman

We don't need lists of rights and wrongs, tables of do's and don'ts: we need books, time, and silence. — Philip Pullman

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

I'm for open-mindedness and tolerance. I'm against any form of fanaticism, fundamentalism or zealotry, and this certainty of 'We have the truth.' The truth is far too large and complex. Nobody has the truth. — Philip Pullman

Do you think I could bear to live on after you died? Oh, Lyra, I'd follow you down to the world of the dead without thinking twice about it, just like you followed Roger; and that would be two lives gone for nothing, my life wasted like yours. No, we should spend our whole lifetimes together, good long busy lives, and if we can't spend them together, we ... we'll have to spend them apart. — Philip Pullman

Hold the question in your mind, but lightly, like it was something alive. — Philip Pullman

We measure the value of a civilized society by the number of Libraries it opens, not the number it closes down. — Philip Pullman

I seemed to have spent the whole time either reading, which I loved, or laughing, which I love, or fooling about, which I loved. There was the usual teenage angst: "Nobody understands me" and "I'm the only genius in the world" and all that stuff. But that didn't get very deep. — Philip Pullman

Chicago's merchant princes like devils. George Pullman continued to cut jobs and wages without reducing rents, even though his company's treasury was flush with over $60 million in cash. Pullman's friends cautioned that he was being pigheaded and had underestimated the anger of his workers. He moved his family out of Chicago and hid his best china. On — Erik Larson

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

Ten-year-old Auggie Pullman, who was born with extreme facial abnormalities and was not expected to survive, goes from being home-schooled to entering fifth grade at a private middle school in Manhattan, which entails enduring the taunting and fear of his classmates as he struggles to be seen as just another student. — Anonymous

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

... And here it is: You don't win races by wishing, you win them by running faster than everyone else. And to do that you have to train hard and strive your utmost, and sometimes even that isn't enough, because another runner just might be more talented than you are. Here's the truth: If you want something, you can have it, but only if you want everything that goes with it, including all the hard work and the despair, and only if you're willing to risk failure. That's the problem with Karl: He was afraid of failing, so he never really tried. — Philip Pullman

The woods were full of sound: the stream between the rocks, the wind among the needles of the pine branches, the chitter of insects and the cries of small arboreal mammals, as well as the birdsong; and from time to time a stronger gust of wind would make one of the branches of a cedar or a fir move against another and groan like a cello. It — 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

I think it's perfectly possible to explain how the universe came about without bringing God into it, but I don't know everything, and there may well be a God somewhere, hiding away. Actually, if he is keeping out of sight, it's because he's ashamed of his followers and all the cruelty and ignorance they're responsible for promoting in his name. If I were him, I'd want nothing to do with them. — Philip Pullman

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

Occasionally they would hear a harsh croak or a splash as some amphibian was disturbed, but the only creature they saw was a toad as big as Will's foot, which could only flop in a pain-filled sideways heave as if it were horribly injured. It lay across the path, trying to move out of the way and looking at them as if it knew they meant to hurt it.
'It would be merciful to kill it,' said Tialys.
'How do you know?' said Lyra. 'It might still like being alive, in spite of everything.'
'If we killed it, we'd be taking it with us,' said Will. 'It wants to stay here. I've killed enough living things. Even a filthy stagnant pool might be better than being dead.'
'But if it's in pain?' said Tialys.
'If it could tell us, we'd know. But since it can't, I'm not going to kill it. That would be considering our feelings rather than the toad's.'
They moved on. — Philip Pullman

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

No one has the right to live without being shocked. — Philip Pullman

We don't need a list of rights and wrongs, tables of dos and don'ts: we need books, time, and silence. Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever. — Philip Pullman

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

On a cold, fretful afternoon in early October, 1872, a hansom cab drew up outside the offices of Lockhart and Selby, Shipping Agents, in the financial heart of London, and a young girl got out and paid the driver.
She was a person of sixteen or so
alone, and uncommonly pretty. She was slender and pale, and dressed in mourning, with a black bonnet under which she tucked back a straying twist of blond hair that the wind had teased loose. She had unusually dark brown eyes for one so fair. Her name was Sally Lockhart; and within fifteen minutes, she was going to kill a man. — Philip Pullman

A murderer was a worthy companion. — Philip Pullman

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

Lyra has never seen such a sight, never heard such a bellow; it was like a mountain laughing. — Philip Pullman

As Mary said that, Lyra felt something strange happen to her body. She found a stirring at the roots of her hair: she found herself breathing faster. She had never been on a roller-coaster, or anything like one, but if she had, she would have recognised the sensations in her breast: they were exciting and frightening at the same time, and she had not the slightest idea why. The sensation continued, and deepened, and changed, as more parts of her body found themselves affected too. She felt as if she had been handed the key to a great house she hadn't known was there, a house that was somehow inside her, and as she turned the key, deep in the darkness of the building she felt other doors opening too, and lights coming on. She sat trembling, hugging her knees, hardly daring to breathe, as Mary went on... — 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

If it takes the entire army and navy to deliver a postal card in Chicago, that card will be delivered. — Grover Cleveland

We need to ensure that children are not forced to waste their time on barren rubbish. — Philip Pullman

And then what?" said her daemon sleepily. "Build what?"
"The Republic of Heaven," said Lyra. — Philip Pullman

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

Tell him, we are not devils but we have friends who are. — Philip Pullman

Theater has always been most important to my psyche. — Bill Pullman

Anyone who doesn't laugh has something on their conscience, you can be sure of that.
- from: 'The Twelve Brothers — Philip Pullman

because he's Will — Philip Pullman

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

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

Lady Harborough ... was on the platform, making a short speech in which she described the valuable work her hospital fund was doing. It seemed to consist largely of rescuing unmarried mothers from poverty and subjecting them to slavery instead, with the additional disadvantage of being preached at daily by evangelical clergymen. — Philip Pullman

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

As Jane Austen might have put it: It is a truth universally acknowledged that young protagonists in search of adventure must ditch their parents. — Philip Pullman

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

Was there only one world after all which spent its time dreaming of others? — Philip Pullman

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

Oxford, where the real and the unreal jostle in the streets; where North Parade is in the south and South Parade is in the north, where Paradise is lost under a pumping station; where the river mists have a solvent and vivifying effect on the stone of the ancient buildings, so that the gargoyles of Magdalen College climb down at night and fight with those from Wykeham, or fish under the bridges, or simply change their expressions overnight; Oxford, where windows open into other worlds ...
Oscar Baedecker, The Coasts of Bohemia — Philip Pullman

I can't bear the thought of oblivion, Asriel," she continued. "Sooner anything than that. I used to think pain would be worse - to be tortured forever - I thought that must be worse . . . But as long as you were conscious, it would be better, wouldn't it? Better than feeling nothing, just going into the dark, everything going out forever and ever? — Philip Pullman

I'm with the Grimms on this: stories for young and old. You can't characterize them any better than that. — Philip Pullman

But suppose your daemon settles in a shape you don't like?
Well, then, you're discontented, en't you? There's plenty of folk as'd like to have a lion as a daemon and they end up with a poodle. And till they learn to be satisfied with what they are, they're going to be fretful about it. Waste of feeling, that is.
But it didn't seem to Lyra that she would ever grow up. — 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

You are an enemy of the Church, Lee Scoresby. By their fruits shall ye know them. — Philip Pullman

What is worth having is worth working for. — Philip Pullman

Rooks were cawing somewhere, and bells were ringing, and from the oxpens the steady beat of a gas engine announced the ascent of the evening Royal Mail zeppelin for London. — Philip Pullman

Just finished 'Secrecy' - truly enthralling both as a love story and as a tale of suspense - but much more than both. — Philip Pullman