Top 300 Philip Pullman Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “But then she remembered what the gyptians had said: Include things, don’t leave them out. Look at things in their context. Include everything.”

— Philip Pullman

153. “The steamy, noisy kitchen was the safest place in the world, it seemed to him. Safety had never been anything to think about before; it was something you took for granted, like his mother’s endless, effortless, generous food, and the fact that there would always be hot plates ready to serve it on.”

— Philip Pullman

154. “For that reason you can’t write with music playing, and anyone who says he can is either writing badly, or not listening to the music, or lying. You need to hear what you’re writing, and for that you need silence.”

— Philip Pullman

155. “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

156. “That is what the Church does, and every church is the same: control, destroy, obliterate every good feeling.”

— Philip Pullman

157. “I am a story teller. If I wanted to send a message I would have written a sermon.”

— Philip Pullman

158. “Literary modernism kind of 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? I know! I’ll write Ulysses.””

— Philip Pullman

159. “Every atom of me and every atom of you... we’ll live in birds and flowers and dragonflies and in pine trees and in clouds and in those little specks of light you see in sunbeams... And when they use our atoms to make new lives, they won’t be able to take just one, they’ll have to take two, one for you and one for me.”

— Philip Pullman

160. “I wish... ” she said, and stopped. There was nothing that could be gained by wishing for it. A final deep shaky breath, and she was ready to go on.”

— Philip Pullman

161. “But there had always been ghosts in the mountains, everyone knew that.”

— Philip Pullman

162. “Hope holds you fast like an anchor so you don’t give way.”

— Philip Pullman

163. “Everything means something,” Lyra said severely. “We just have to find out how to read it.”

— Philip Pullman

164. “I see the Master as a man having terrible choices to make; whatever he chooses will do harm, but maybe if he does the right thing, a little less harm will come about than if he chooses wrong. God preserve me from having to make that sort of choice.”

— Philip Pullman

165. “And then Serafina understood something for which witches had no word: it was the idea of pilgrimage. She understood why these beings would wait for thousands of years and travel vast distances in order to be close to something important, and how they would feel differently for the rest of time, having been briefly in its presence.”

— Philip Pullman

166. “She’s innocent, and she loves easily.”

— Philip Pullman

167. “Stories... entertain and teach; they help us both enjoy life and endure it. After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the things we need most in the world.”

— Philip Pullman

168. “She was learning that if she pretended to be weak and frightened, and dabbed at her eyes with a lacy handkerchief, she could turn aside all manner of pressing questions.”

— Philip Pullman

169. “Death is going to die.”

— Philip Pullman

170. “Because Lyra now realized, if she hadn’t done so before, that all the fear in her nature was drawn to Mrs. Coulter as a compass needle drawn to the Pole.”

— Philip Pullman

171. “Words belong in contexts, not pegged out like biological specimens.”

— Philip Pullman

172. “Beacause if they think the Dust is bad, it must be good.”

— Philip Pullman

173. “That is a question with too complicated an answer.”

— Philip Pullman

174. “There are two great powers,” the man said, “and they’ve been fighting since time began. Every advance in human life, every scrap of knowledge and wisdom and decency we have has been torn by one side from the teeth of the other. Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit.”

— Philip Pullman

175. “If Mrs. Coulter saw his reaction, she didn’t show it. She went on: “Look, Will, I don’t know how you came to meet my daughter, and I don’t know what you know already, and I certainly don’t know if I can trust you; but equally, I’m tired of having to lie. So here it is: the truth.”

— Philip Pullman

176. “At one point he seemed to be showing the moon to Lyra, pointing up at it and holding her so she could see, or perhaps he was showing Lyra to the moon; at any rate he looked like a lord in his own domain, with nothing to fear and all the silvery night to enjoy.”

— Philip Pullman

177. “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

178. “I am a religious person, although I am not a believer.”

— Philip Pullman

179. “You en’t gyptian, Lyra. You might pass for gyptian with practice, but there’s more to us than gyptian language. There’s deeps in us and strong currents. We’re water people all through, and you en’t, you’re a fire person. What you’re most like is marsh fire, that’s the place you have in the gyptian scheme. You got witch oil in your soul. Deceptive, that’s what you are child.”

— Philip Pullman

180. “And among academicians, and among spirits. I found folly everywhere, but there were grains of wisdom in every stream of it. No doubt there was much more wisdom that I failed to recognize. Life is hard, Mr. Scoresby, but we cling to it all the same.”

— Philip Pullman

181. “The fact was that where Will is concerned, she was developing a new kind of sense, as if he were simply more in focus than anyone she’d known before. Everything about him was clear and close and immediate.”

— Philip Pullman

182. “Maybe art itself was a kind of voodoo, possessing you, giving you supernatural power, letting you see in the dark.”

— Philip Pullman

183. “I thought physics could be done to the glory of God, till I saw there wasn’t any God at all.”

— Philip Pullman

184. “Eventually, child, you will come to the land of the dead with no effort, no risk, a safe, calm journey, in the company of your own death, your special, devoted friend, who’s been beside you every moment of your life, who knows you better than yourself.”

— Philip Pullman

185. “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

186. “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

187. “Keep away from the literal-minded folk, and ignore the scoffers.”

— Philip Pullman

188. “If you can’t think of what to write, tough luck; write anyway. If you can think of lots more when you’ve finished the three pages, don’t write it; it’ll be that much easier to get going next day.”

— Philip Pullman

189. “To be sure, there’s a warm passion behind what you say. But if you give in to that passion, friends, you’re a doing what I always warned you agin: you’re a placing the satisfaction of your own feelings above the work you have to do.”

— Philip Pullman

190. “Behind them lay pain and death and fear; ahead of them lay doubt, and danger, and fathomless mysteries.”

— Philip Pullman

191. “In some lights they were hardly there at all, just visible as a drifting quality in the light, a rhythmic evanescence, like veils of transparency turning before a mirror.”

— Philip Pullman

192. “This is a deep and uncomfortable paradox, which will not have escaped you; we can only defend democracy by being undemocratic. Every secret service knows this paradox.”

— Philip Pullman

193. “So they had language, and they had fire, and they had society. And about then she found an adjustment being made in her mind, as the word creatures became the word people. These beings weren’t human, but they were people, she told herself; it’s not them, they’re us. They.”

— Philip Pullman

194. “Maybe so,” he said, “but whatever little chance of safety there is, I want her to have it.”

— Philip Pullman

195. “I’m perfectly happy about being superstitious and atheistic.”

— Philip Pullman

196. “The sight filled the northern sky; the immensity of it was scarcely conceivable. As if from Heaven itself, great curtains of delicate light hung and trembled. Pale green and rose-pink, and as transparent as the most fragile fabric, and at the bottom edge a profound and fiery crimson like the fires of Hell, they swung and shimmered loosely with more grace than the most skillful dancer.”

— Philip Pullman

197. “It’s important to put it like that: not “I am a writer,” but rather “I write stories.” If you put the emphasis on yourself rather than your work, you’re in danger of thinking that you’re the most important thing. But you’re not. The story is what matters, and you’re only the servant. Your job is to get it out on time and in good order.”

— Philip Pullman

198. “It might have been a new way for her heart to beat.”

— Philip Pullman

199. “Fritz had to stop himself from interrupting when Karl spoke about the difficulty of working. Stories are just as hard as clocks to put together, and they can go wrong just as easily – as we shall soon see with Fritz’s own story in a page or two. Still, Fritz was an optimist, and Karl was a pessimist, and that makes all the difference in the world.”

— Philip Pullman

200. “Eve was tempted not by wealth or love but by knowledge.”

— Philip Pullman