Top 300 Philip Pullman Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “By the light of a candle, he composed a letter, saying everything as briefly as possible:.”

— Philip Pullman

252. “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

253. “A genuine scientist would love the subject for itself; I think I love science for the stories that are told about it.”

— Philip Pullman

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

— Philip Pullman

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

— Philip Pullman

256. “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

257. “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

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

— Philip Pullman

259. “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

260. “All she knew was that she must be in love with someone, or she wouldn’t feel so miserable.”

— Philip Pullman

261. “Write some letters.” “Don’t want to.” “Bake a cake to give that boy a slice of.” “He might come while I’m still making it, and then we’d have to make conversation for an hour and a half till it was ready. Anyway, we’ve got some biscuits.” “Well, I give up,” he said.”

— Philip Pullman

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

— Philip Pullman

263. “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

264. “Speaking for myself, I’ve always found great intelligence in a woman a highly attractive feature.”

— Philip Pullman

265. “Besides, if you want to write something perfect, write a haiku. Anything longer is bound to have a few passages that don’t work as well as they might.”

— Philip Pullman

266. “If I told you half of what he’s done to keep us alive and safe, well, you wouldn’t imagine it could be true.”

— Philip Pullman

267. “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

268. “Rooks were cawing somewhere, and bells were ringing, and from the oxpens the steady beat of a gas engine announced the ascent of the evening Royal Mail zeppelin for London.”

— Philip Pullman

269. “The effect was as if each teacher was being examined by a fierce inspector, and each lesson became an ordeal in which not the pupils but the teachers were being tested.”

— Philip Pullman

270. “Looking at them now, thought Jim, you’d never believe they weren’t in love with each other, and not with a hopeless, doomed obsession like poor Isabel Meredith. This was what love ought to be like: playful and passionate and teasing, and dangerous, too, with sharp intelligence in it.”

— Philip Pullman

271. “Just finished ‘Secrecy’ – truly enthralling both as a love story and as a tale of suspense – but much more than both.”

— Philip Pullman

272. “The state of mind which I put myself when I tell a story is one in which superstition flourishes very easily. And I welcome that because it helps me.”

— Philip Pullman

273. “Men pass in front of our eyes like butterflies, creatures of a brief season. We love them; they are brave, proud, beautiful, clever; and they die almost at once. They die so soon that our hearts are continually wracked with pain.”

— Philip Pullman

274. “You forget I am a woman, Your Eminence, and thus not so subtle as a prince of the Church.”

— Philip Pullman

275. “When you’re young, you do think that things last for ever. Unfortunately, they don’t.”

— Philip Pullman

276. “She had been hurt too when they pulled apart; one day, perhaps, they’d be able to talk about it...”

— Philip Pullman

277. “He let her do it, then looked around for his fingers. There they were, curled like a bloody quotation mark on the lead. He laughed.”

— Philip Pullman

278. “All writing is difficult. The most you can hope for is a day when it goes reasonably easily. Plumbers don’t get plumber’s block, and doctors don’t get doctor’s block; why should writers be the only profession that gives a special name to the difficulty of working, and then expects sympathy for it?”

— Philip Pullman

279. “Maybe sometimes we don’t do the right thing because the wrong thing looks more dangerous, and we don’t want to look scared, so we go and do the.”

— Philip Pullman

280. “She was afraid of her father, and she admired him profoundly, and she thought he was stark mad; but who was she to judge?”

— Philip Pullman

281. “Which made her barefaced lies all the more effective, Lord Asriel thought with disgust; she lied in the very marrow of her bones.”

— Philip Pullman

282. “Once we use the word spiritual, we don’t have to explain anymore, because it belongs to the Church then, and no one can question it.”

— Philip Pullman

283. “I guess you are,” said Lee. “You have a strange way about you, Dr Grumman. You ever spend any time among the witches?” “Yes,” said Grumman. “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

284. “Living was hateful, and death was no better, and from end to end of the universe this was the first and last and only truth.”

— Philip Pullman

285. “And till they learn to be satisfied with what they are, they’re going to be fretful about it. Waste of feeling, that is.”

— Philip Pullman

286. “Was I wrong?” “Yes, of course. But you had no choice.” “I must have.” “No, you had to do it. If you hadn’t done it, you’d have felt feeble.” “It shouldn’t be about how we feel – guilty, feeble – ” “No, and it isn’t. It’s about wrong and less wrong. Bad and less bad. This is about as good a cover as anyone could find. Leave it at that.”

— Philip Pullman

287. “And thus the prophecy that the Master of Jordan College had made to the Librarian, that Lyra would make a great betrayal and it would hurt her terribly, was fulfilled.”

— Philip Pullman

288. “Novels and stories are not arguments; they set out not to convince, but to beguile.”

— Philip Pullman

289. “And if we – later on – she was whispering shakily, If we meet someone we like, and if we marry them, then we must be good to them, and not make comparisons all the time and wish we were married to each other instead... But just keep coming here once a year, just for an hour, just to be together...”

— Philip Pullman

290. “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 for ever.”

— Philip Pullman

291. “They could not have done it alone, but together they did it.”

— Philip Pullman

292. “Still, Fritz was an optimist, and Karl was a pessimist, and that makes all the difference in the world.”

— Philip Pullman

293. “Its purpose was to defend democracy in this country, first of all. Then to defend the principles of freedom of thought and expression.”

— Philip Pullman

294. “How can the weather have a state of mind?” said Papadimitriou. The gyptian said, “You think the weather is only out there? It’s in here too,” and tapped his head. “So do you mean that the weather’s state of mind is just our state of mind?” “Nothing is just anything,” the gyptian replied, and would say no more.”

— Philip Pullman

295. “So, wondering whether any lovers before them had made this blissful discovery, they lay together as the earth turned slowly and the moon and stars blazed above them.”

— Philip Pullman

296. “Of all the dangers that threaten us at the beginning of the third millennium – the degradation of the environment, the increasing undemocratic power of the great corporations, the continuing threats to peace in regions full of decaying nuclear weapons, and so on – one of the biggest dangers of all comes from fundamentalist religion... From the Christian conservatives in the USA to the Taliban in Afghanistan.”

— Philip Pullman

297. “Poetry is not a fancy way of giving you information; it’s an incantation. It is actually a magic spell. It changes things; it changes you.” An interview with Philip Pullman.”

— Philip Pullman

298. “There was nothing that could be gained by wishing for it.”

— Philip Pullman

299. “To ask the question and wait for the answer is to know that there will be no answer.”

— Philip Pullman

300. “Good intentions never wrote a story worth reading.”

— Philip Pullman