Philip Pullman quotes - page 7

She felt a nausea of the soul, a hideous and sickening despair, a melancholy weariness so profound that she was going to die of it. (Philip Pullman)
You haven't any choice: you're the bearer. It's picked you out. And, what's more, they know you've got it; and if you don't use it against them, they'll tear it from your hands and use it against the rest of us, forever and ever.
Philip Pullman
This edge," said Giacomo Paradisi, touching the steel with the handle of a spoon, "will cut through any material in the world. Look.
Philip Pullman
It's an alethiometer. It's one of only six that were ever made. Lyra, I urge you again: keep it private.
Philip Pullman
A sense of belonging, a sense of being part of a real and important story, a sense of being connected to other people, to people who are not here any more, to those who have gone before us. And a sense of being connected to the universe itself. All those things were promised and summed up in the phrase, 'The Kingdom of Heaven.
Philip Pullman
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.
Philip Pullman
I would say that those people who claim that they do know that there is a God have found this claim of theirs the most wonderful excuse for behaving extremely badly. So belief in a God does not seem to me to result automatically in behaving very well.
Philip Pullman
He meant the Kingdom was over, the Kingdom of Heaven, it was all finished. We shouldn't live as if it mattered more than this life in this world, because where we are is always the most important place.
Philip Pullman
Tell them stories.
Philip Pullman
You think things have to be possible? Things have to be!
Philip Pullman
When you stopped believing in God, did you stop believing in good and evil? (Philip Pullman)
Doesn't it scare you, having your death close by all the time?
Philip Pullman
True education flowers at the point when delight falls in love with responsibility.
Philip Pullman
I had passed through the entire British education system studying literature, culminating in three years of reading English at Oxford, and they'd never told me about something as basic as the importance of point of view in fiction!
Philip Pullman
My only real claim to anyone's attention lies in my writing.
Philip Pullman
For a long time I thought I was a poet, but that's a high title to claim.
Philip Pullman
Being a practiced liar doesn't mean you have a powerful imagination. Many good liars have no imagination at all; it's that which gives their lies such wide-eyed conviction.
Philip Pullman
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
What I do say is that I can write verse, and that the writing of verse in strict form is the best possible training for writing good prose.
Philip Pullman
What I couldn't help noticing was that I learned more about the novel in a morning by trying to write a page of one than I'd learned in seven years or so of trying to write criticism.
Philip Pullman
But suppose your dæmon settles in a shape you don't like? Well, then, you're discontented, en't you? There's plenty of folk as'd like to have a lion as a dæmon and they end up with a poodle. And till they learn to be satisfied with what they are, they're going to be fretful about it. Waste of feeling, that is. But it didn't seem to Lyra that she would ever grow up. (Philip Pullman)
I'm trying to write a book about what it means to be human, to grow up, to suffer and learn. My quarrel with much (not all) fantasy is it has this marvellous toolbox and does nothing with it except construct shoot-em-up games. Why shouldn't a work of fantasy be as truthful and profound about becoming an adult human being as the work of George Eliot or Jane Austen? Well, there are a few fantasies that are. One of them is Paradise Lost.
Philip Pullman
They're often bracketed together, Tolkien and Lewis, which I suppose is fair because they were great friends - both Oxford writers and scholars, both Christians. Tolkien's work has very little of interest in it to a reader of literature, in my opinion. When I think of literature - Dickens, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad - the great novelists found their subject matter in human nature, emotion, in the ways we relate to each other. If that's what Tolkien's up to, he's left out half of it. The books are wholly male-oriented. The entire question of sexual relationships is omitted.
Philip Pullman
Lyra, I'm going to give you something, and you must promise to keep it private. Will you swear to that?" "Yes," Lyra said. He crossed to the desk and took from a drawer a small package wrapped in black velvet. When he unfolded the cloth, Lyra saw something like a large watch or a small clock: a thick disk of gold and crystal. It might have been a compass or something of the sort. "What is it?" she said. "It's an alethiometer. It's one of only six that were ever made. Lyra, I urge you again: keep it private. It would be better if Mrs. Coulter didn't know about it. Your uncle - " "But what does it do?" "It tells you the truth. As for how to read it, you'll have to learn by yourself. Now go - it's getting lighter - hurry back to your room before anyone sees you.
Philip Pullman
I'm perfectly well aware that you've found a doorway somewhere. I guess it's not too far from Summertown, where I dropped Lizzie, or Lyra, this morning. And that through the doorway is another world, one with no grownups in it. Right so far? Well, you see, the man who made that doorway has got a knife. He's hiding in that other world right now, and he's extremely afraid. He has reason to be. If he's where I think he is, he's in an old stone tower with angels carved around the doorway. The Torre degli Angeli.
Philip Pullman