Top 350 Philip Pullman Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

204. “There is time, and there is what is beyond time. There is darkness, and there is light. There is the world and the flesh, and there is God.”

— Philip Pullman

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

— Philip Pullman

206. “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

207. “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

208. “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

209. “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

210. “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

211. “War asks many people to do unreasonable things.”

— Philip Pullman

212. “Mrs. Coulter selected her lovers for their power and influence, but it did no harm if they were good-looking. Did she ever become fond of a lover? Not once. She could not keep her servants, either.”

— Philip Pullman

213. “Nothing is just anything.”

— Philip Pullman

214. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

215. “Lyra had to adjust to her new sense of her own story, and that couldn’t be done in a day.”

— Philip Pullman

216. “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

217. “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

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

— Philip Pullman

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

— Philip Pullman

220. “Does he think the job of a librarian is so simple, so empty of content, that anyone can step up and do it for a thank-you and a cup of tea? Does he think that all a librarian does is to tidy the shelves?”

— Philip Pullman

221. “He sat down and collected his thoughts. They were quite easy to collect, because there weren’t very many of them, and they all concerned the same subject – what a burden his life was.”

— Philip Pullman

222. “You know the theorem of Pythagoras?” “The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides.” “That’s exactly it. And is that true for every example you’ve tried?” “Yes.”

— Philip Pullman

223. “Being cheerful starts now, Will thought as hard as he could, but it was like trying to hold a fighting wolf still in his arms when it wanted to claw at his face and tear out his throat; nevertheless, he did it, and he thought no one could see the effort it cost him.”

— Philip Pullman

224. “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

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

— Philip Pullman

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

— Philip Pullman

227. “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

228. “But we shouldn’t believe things because it makes us happy to, she thought. We should believe things because they’re true, and if that makes us unhappy, that’s very unfortunate, but it’s not the reason of fault.”

— Philip Pullman

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

— Philip Pullman

230. “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

231. “Lyra has never seen such a sight, never heard such a bellow; it was like a mountain laughing.”

— Philip Pullman

232. “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

233. “Like a wave that has been building it’s strength over a thousand miles of ocean, and which makes little stir in the deep water, but which, when it reaches the shallows rears itself high up into the sky, terrifying the shore dwellers, before crashing down on land with irresistible power – so Iorek Byrnison rose up against Iofur, exploding upward from his firm footing on the dry rock and slashing with a ferocious left hand at the exposed jaw of Iofur Raknison.”

— Philip Pullman

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

— Philip Pullman

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

— Philip Pullman

236. “Make a noise in there and I won’t help you. You’re on your own.”

— Philip Pullman

237. “Then excuse me, Miss Silver, but they have separated their intelligences from their other faculties. And that is not an intelligent thing to do.”

— Philip Pullman

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

— Philip Pullman

239. “If you thought for one moment that I would release my daughter into the care – the care! – of a body of men with a feverish obsession with sexuality, men with dirty fingernails, reeking of ancient sweat, men whose furtive imaginations would crawl over her body like cockroaches – if you thought I would expose my child to that... you are more stupid than you take me for.”

— Philip Pullman

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

— Philip Pullman

241. “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

242. “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

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

— Philip Pullman

Featured in: Romance Quotes

244. “You are an enemy of the Church, Lee Scoresby. By their fruits shall ye know them.”

— Philip Pullman

245. “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

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

— Philip Pullman

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

— Philip Pullman

248. “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

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

— Philip Pullman

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

250. “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