Top 300 Philip Pullman Quotes (2023 Update)
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201. “Make a noise in there and I won’t help you. You’re on your own.”

— Philip Pullman

202. “If you speak to people, you just attract their attention,” he said, with a shaking voice. “You should just keep quiet and still and they overlook you. I’ve been doing it all my life. I know how to do it. Your way, you just – you make yourself visible.”

— Philip Pullman

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

— Philip Pullman

204. “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

205. “He had to stay close to the ship, of course, for he could never go far from her; but she sensed his desire to speed as far and as fast as he could, for pure exhilaration. She shared his pleasure, but for her it wasn’t simple pleasure, for there was pain and fear in it too. Suppose he loved being a dolphin more than he loved being with her on land? What would she do then? Her.”

— Philip Pullman

206. “No one, not even Shakespeare, surpasses Milton in his command of the sound, the music, the weight and taste and texture of English words.”

— Philip Pullman

207. “Do you think I need anything else?” “You could do with some sense,” came the reply. “Some faculty to enable you to recognize wisdom and incline you to respect and obey it.”

— Philip Pullman

208. “Malcolm stared back calmly, though he felt anything but calm: if that monkey had a name, it might be Malice, he thought.”

— Philip Pullman

209. “It was difficult to tell them the truth when a lie would have been so much easier for them to understand.”

— Philip Pullman

210. “There he dwelt, a prisoner acting like a king.”

— Philip Pullman

211. “He was liked when noticed, but not noticed much, and that did him no harm either.”

— Philip Pullman

212. “Nothing is just anything.”

— Philip Pullman

213. “She is the goddess of the dead. She comes to you smiling and kindly, and you know it is time to die.”

— Philip Pullman

214. “We need to imagine as well as measure.”

— Philip Pullman

215. “I stay here and drink spirits because the men here took my armor away, and without that, I can hunt seals but I can’t go to war; and I am an armored bear; war is the sea I swim in and the air I breathe.”

— Philip Pullman

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

— Philip Pullman

217. “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

218. “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

219. “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

220. “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

221. “Both of them sat silent on the moss-covered rock in the slant of sunlight through the old pines and thought how many tiny chances had conspired to bring them to this place. Each of those chances might have gone a different way.”

— Philip Pullman

222. “Whatever happened behind now was simply that: behind. Lyra had left it. She felt she was leaving the world altogether, so remote and intent she was, so high they were climbing, so strange and uncanny was the light that bathed them.”

— Philip Pullman

223. “Each kiss was nearer to the last one of all.”

— Philip Pullman

224. “He nestled in her arms, and she knew she would rather die than let them be parted and face that sadness again; it would send her mad with grief and terror.”

— Philip Pullman

225. “The narrating voice that tells ‘Middlemarch’ is just as much a made-up character as Dorothea or Mr. Casaubon.”

— Philip Pullman

226. “I’ve just read it so much, it memorized itself.”

— Philip Pullman

227. “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

228. “I’m with the Grimms on this: stories for young and old. You can’t characterize them any better than that.”

— Philip Pullman

229. “The e-book revolution has made it very easy to pay writers a good deal less than what their work is worth. I do strongly believe that we writers ought to hold out for much better royalties.”

— Philip Pullman

230. “Lyra bent over the open vessel and found the concentrated fragrance of every rose that had ever bloomed: a sweetness and power so profound that it moved beyond sweetness altogether and out of the other side of its own complexity into a realm of clear and simple purity and beauty. It was the smell of sunlight itself.”

— Philip Pullman

231. “A story, to me, has a particular sprite, like the angel of the spirit of that story – and it’s my job to attend to what it wants to do.”

— Philip Pullman

232. “It’s about wrong and less wrong. Bad and less bad.”

— Philip Pullman

233. “My only real claim to anyone’s attention lies in my writing.”

— Philip Pullman

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

— Philip Pullman

235. “She has committed great sins, but they’ve been forgiven, and that’s why she loves so deeply.”

— Philip Pullman

236. “Whenever you turn your head, your deaths dodge behind you. Wherever you look, they hide. They hide in a teacup. Or in a dewdrop. Or in a breath of wind.”

— Philip Pullman

237. “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

238. “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

239. “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

240. “When you write a story you’re not trying to prove anything or demonstrate the merits of this case or the flaws in that. At its simplest, what you’re doing is making up some interesting events, putting them in the best order to show the connections between them and recounting them as clearly as you can.”

— Philip Pullman

241. “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

242. “Lyra swore with every word she knew.”

— Philip Pullman

243. “It was a jaw cracking, lung-bursting yawn that lasted almost a minute.”

— Philip Pullman

244. “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

245. “What is he? A friend or an enemy? The alethiometer answered: He is a murderer.”

— Philip Pullman

246. “In fact, these possibility collapses happen at the level of elementary particles, but they happen in just the same way: one moment several things are possible, the next moment only one thing happens, and the rest don’t exist. Except that other worlds have sprung into being, on which they did happen.”

— Philip Pullman

247. “It might not be fair, but no one’s to blame.”

— Philip Pullman

248. “You know, it isn’t really surprising that there are things about ourselves that still remain a mystery to us,” he said. “Maybe we should be comforted that the knowledge is there, even if it’s withheld for a while.”

— Philip Pullman

249. “No literary work longer than a haiku is going to be entirely without faults.”

— Philip Pullman

250. “And she sobbed so passionately he thought that hearts really did break, and hers was breaking now, for she fell to the ground wailing and shuddering, and Pantalaimon beside her became a wolf and howled with bitter grief.”

— Philip Pullman