Top 300 Philip Pullman Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “My books are about killing God.”

— Philip Pullman

52. “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

53. “Argue with anything else, but don’t argue with your own nature.”

— Philip Pullman

54. “When it comes to telling children stories, they don’t need simple language. They need beautiful language.”

— Philip Pullman

55. “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

56. “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

57. “Sticks and stones, I’ll break yer bones, but names ain’t worth a quarrel.”

— Philip Pullman

58. “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

59. “I have stolen ideas from every book I have ever read.”

— Philip Pullman

60. “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

61. “Do not lie to the Scholar.”

— Philip Pullman

62. “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

63. “We need to ensure that children are not forced to waste their time on barren rubbish.”

— Philip Pullman

64. “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

65. “Tell him, we are not devils but we have friends who are.”

— Philip Pullman

66. “Teachers often make the mistake of thinking they’re the boss of the class; they’re not. The boss of the class is sitting down there somewhere.”

— Philip Pullman

67. “But I know that all the things I do know are very small compared with the things that I don’t know.”

— Philip Pullman

68. “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

69. “Then she was pressing her little proud broken self against his face, as close as she could get, and then they died.”

— Philip Pullman

70. “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

71. “All good things pass away.”

— Philip Pullman

72. “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 that this is a good deed, because it helps someone or that’s an evil one because it hurts them. People are too complicated to have simple labels.”

— Philip Pullman

73. “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

74. “All things from the north are devilish.”

— Philip Pullman

75. “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

76. “Shame to die with one bullet left, though.”

— Philip Pullman

77. “Long before writing, people were telling each other stories and the audiobook goes all the way back to that tradition.”

— Philip Pullman

78. “Dust is only a name for what happens when matter begins to understand itself.”

— Philip Pullman

79. “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

80. “The Dust pouring down from the stars had found a living home again, and these children-no-longer-children, saturated with love, were the cause of it all.”

— Philip Pullman

81. “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

82. “When he’d sworn at her and been sworn at in return, they became great friends.”

— Philip Pullman

83. “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

84. “Human beings can’t see anything without wanting to destroy it, Lyra. That’s original sin.”

— Philip Pullman

85. “Men pass in front of our eyes like butterflies, creatures of a brief season. We love them; they are brave, proud, beautiful, and clever.”

— Philip Pullman

86. “One moment several things are possible, the next moment only one happens, and the rest don’t exist. Except that other worlds have sprung into being, on which the did happen.”

— Philip Pullman

87. “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

88. “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

89. “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

90. “A murderer was a worthy companion.”

— Philip Pullman

91. “Around them there was nothing but silence, as if all the world were holding its breath.”

— Philip Pullman

92. “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

93. “She longed for cutlasses, pistols, and brandy; she had to make do with coffee, and pencils, and verbs.”

— Philip Pullman

94. “I was born in Norwich in 1946, and educated in England, Zimbabwe, and Australia, before my family settled in North Wales.”

— Philip Pullman

95. “The mind has plenty of ways of preventing you from writing, and paralysing self-consciousness is a good one. The only thing to do is ignore it, and remember what Vincent van Gogh said in one of his letters about the painter’s fear of the blank canvas – the canvas, he said, is far more afraid of the painter.”

— Philip Pullman

96. “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

97. “Even if it means oblivion, friends, I’ll welcome it, because it won’t be nothing. We’ll be alive again in a thousand blades of grass, and a million leaves; we’ll be falling in the raindrops and blowing in the fresh breeze; we’ll be glittering in the dew under the stars and the moon out there in the physical world, which is our true home and always was.”

— Philip Pullman

98. “The wave function of this situation is going to collapse quite soon.”

— Philip Pullman

99. “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

100. “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