Philip Pullman Quotes

You cannot change what you are, only what you do.

Human beings can't see anything without wanting to destroy it. That's original sin. And I'm going to destroy it. Death is going to die.

We feel cold, but we don't mind it, because we will not come to harm. And if we wrapped up against the cold, we wouldn't feel other things, like the bright tingle of the stars, or the music of the aur...

Each kiss was nearer to the last one of all.

You speak of destiny as if it was fixed.

There’s been terrible things we seen, en’t there? And more a coming, more’n likely. So I think I’d rather not know what’s in the future. I’ll stick to the present.

I can’t bear the thought of oblivion, Asriel, she continued. Sooner anything than that. I used to think pain would be worse—to be tortured forever—I thought that must be worse . . . But as long as you...

That’s the duty of the old, to be anxious on behalf of the young. And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old.

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 t...

Around them there was nothing but silence, as if all the world were holding its breath.

Suppose it never stops? she whispered.The gyptian man didn't say it'd do that. Just that there was going to be a flood.

It was a shocking thing to say and I knew it was a shocking thing to say. But no one has the right to live without being shocked. No one has the right to spend their life without being offended. Nobod...

There's a hunger for stories in all of us, adults too. We need stories so much that we're even willing to read bad books to get them, if the good books won't supply them.

I'll be looking for you, Will, every moment, every single moment. And when we do find each other again, we'll cling together so tight that nothing and no one'll ever tear us apart. Every atom of me an...

Stories aren't made of language: they're made of something else. A little earlier I said that stories were about life; perhaps they're made of life.

Waste of time, said the leper. There's a dozen or more beggars who come here every day, pretending to be cripples, hiring themselves out to the holy men. A couple of drachmas and they'll swear they've...

Lord, if I thought you were listening, I'd pray for this above all: that any church set up in your name should remain poor, and powerless, and modest. That it should wield no authority except that of...

I feel with some passion that what we truly are is private, and almost infinitely complex, and ambiguous, and both external and internal, and double- or triple- or multiply natured, and largely myster...

That is what the Church does, and every church is the same: control, destroy, obliterate every good feeling.

We have to build the Republic of Heaven where we are, because for us, there is no elsewhere.