Top 300 Philip Pullman Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

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

— Philip Pullman

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

— Philip Pullman

205. “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

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

— Philip Pullman

207. “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

208. “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

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

— Philip Pullman

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

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

— Philip Pullman

214. “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

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

— Philip Pullman

216. “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

217. “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

218. “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

219. “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

220. “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

221. “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

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

— Philip Pullman

223. “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

224. “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

225. “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

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

— Philip Pullman

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

— Philip Pullman

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

— Philip Pullman

229. “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

230. “Nothing is just anything.”

— Philip Pullman

231. “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

232. “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

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

— Philip Pullman

234. “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

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

— Philip Pullman

Featured in: Romance Quotes

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

— Philip Pullman

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

— Philip Pullman

238. “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

239. “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

240. “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

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

— Philip Pullman

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

— Philip Pullman

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

— Philip Pullman

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

— Philip Pullman

245. “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

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

— Philip Pullman

247. “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

248. “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

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

— Philip Pullman

250. “Finally, and almost simultaneously, the children discovered what it was like to be drunk. “Do they like doing this?” gasped Roger, after vomiting copiously. “Yes,” said Lyra, in the same condition. “And so do I,” she added stubbornly. Lyra.”

— Philip Pullman