Top 300 Philip Pullman Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 7

51. “Men and women are moved by tides much fiercer than you can imagine, and they sweep us all up into the current.”

— Philip Pullman

52. “I practiced on the greatest model of storytelling we’ve got, which is “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey.” I told those stories many, many times.”

— Philip Pullman

53. “My books are about killing God.”

— Philip Pullman

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

— Philip Pullman

55. “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

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

— Philip Pullman

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

— Philip Pullman

58. “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

59. “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

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

— Philip Pullman

61. “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

62. “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

63. “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

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

— Philip Pullman

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

— Philip Pullman

66. “No one has the right to live without being shocked.”

— Philip Pullman

67. “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

68. “Do not lie to the Scholar.”

— Philip Pullman

69. “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

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

— Philip Pullman

71. “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

72. “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

73. “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

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

— Philip Pullman

75. “The evening sky was awash with peach, apricot, cream: tender little ice-cream clouds in a wide orange sky.”

— Philip Pullman

76. “You’re in a world full of color and you want to see it in black and white.”

— Philip Pullman

77. “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

78. “Was there only one world after all which spent its time dreaming of others?”

— Philip Pullman

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

— Philip Pullman

80. “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

81. “All good things pass away.”

— Philip Pullman

82. “I will love you forever; 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

83. “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

84. “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

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

— Philip Pullman

86. “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

87. “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

88. “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

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

— Philip Pullman

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

— Philip Pullman

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

— Philip Pullman

92. “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

93. “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

94. “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

95. “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

96. “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

97. “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

98. “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

99. “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

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

— Philip Pullman