Quotes of Philip Pullman - somelinesforyou

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

- Philip Pullman

“ If you want something you can have it, but only if you want everything that goes with it, including all the hard work and the despair, and only if you’re willing to risk failure. ”

- Philip Pullman

“ You’ll drift apart, it’s true, but you’ll be out in the open, part of everything alive again. ”

- Philip Pullman

“ After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world. ”

- Philip Pullman

“ We don’t need a list of rights and wrongs, tables of dos and don’ts: we need books, time, and silence. ”

- Philip Pullman

“ 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 and every atom of you... We'll live in birds and flowers and dragonflies and pine trees and in clouds and in those little specks of light you see floating in sunbeams... And when they use our atoms to make new lives, they wont' just be able to take one, they'll have to take two, one of you and one of me, we'll be joined so tight... ”

- Philip Pullman

“ I told him I was going to betray you, and betray Lyra, and he believed me because I was corrupt and full of wickedness; he looked so deep I felt sure he'd see the truth. But I lied too well. I was lying with every nerve and fiber and everything I'd ever done...I wanted him to find no good in me, and he didn't. There is none. ”

- Philip Pullman

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

- Philip Pullman

“ If you want something you can have it, but only if you want everything that goes with it, including all the hard work and the despair, and only if you're willing to risk failure. ”

- Philip Pullman

“ You don't win races by wishing, you win them by running faster than everyone else does. ”

- Philip Pullman

“ 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. ”

- Philip Pullman

“ When you live for many hundreds of years, you know that every opportunity will come again. ”

- Philip Pullman

“ We don’t need a list of rights and wrongs, tables of dos and don’ts: we need books, time, and silence. Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever. ”

- Philip Pullman

“ 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. ”

- Philip Pullman

“ If you want something you can have it, but only if you want everything that goes with it, including all the hard work and the despair, and only if you're willing to risk failure. ”

- Philip Pullman

“ I am a strong believer in the tyranny, the dictatorship, the absolute authority of the writer. ”

- Philip Pullman

“ As for what it's against the story is against those who pervert and misuse religion, or any other kind of doctrine with a holy book and a priesthood and an apparatus of power that wields unchallengeable authority, in order to dominate and suppress human freedoms. ”

- Philip Pullman

“ You don't win races by wishing, you win them by running faster than everyone else does. ”

- Philip Pullman

“ because he's Will ”

- Philip Pullman

“ When you choose one way out of many, all the ways you don't take are snuffed out like candles, as if they'd never existed. ”

- Philip Pullman

“ 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 wrong thing just because it's dangerous. We're more concerned with not looking scared than with judging right. ”

- Philip Pullman

“ People should decide on the books' meanings for themselves. They'll find a story that attacks such things as cruelty, oppression, intolerance, unkindness, narrowmindedness, and celebrates love, kindness, openmindedness, tolerance, curiosity, human intelligence. ”

- Philip Pullman

“ What is the world of the spirits? It is nothing I know about. I don't know what spirit is." "Spirit is what matter does. ”

- Philip Pullman

“ I told him I was going to betray you, and betray Lyra, and he believed me because I was corrupt and full of wickedness; he looked so deep I felt sure he'd see the truth. But I lied too well. I was lying with every nerve and fiber and everything I'd ever done...I wanted him to find no good in me, and he didn't. There is none. ”

- Philip Pullman

“ Her last conscious thought was disgust at life; her senses had lied to her. The world was not made of energy and delight but of foulness, betrayal, and lassitude. 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

“ I think there's a difference between (a) offending people for its own sake, which I don't necessarily want to do, because some people are good and decent and it would be unkind to upset them simply to indulge my own selfimportance, and (b) challenging their prejudices, their preconceptions, or their comfortable assumptions. I'm very happy to do that. But we need to be on our guard when people say they're offended. No one actually has the right to go through life without being offended. Some people think they can say "suchandsuch offends me" and that will stop the "offensive" words or behaviour and force the "offender" to apologise. I'm very much against that tactic. No one should be able to shut down discussion by making their feelings more important than the search for truth. If such people are offended, they should put up with it. ”

- Philip Pullman

“ When you look at what C.S. Lewis is saying, his message is so antilife, so cruel, so unjust. The view that the Narnia books have for the material world is one of almost undisguised contempt. At one point, the old professor says, ‘It’s all in Plato’ — meaning that the physical world we see around us is the crude, shabby, imperfect, secondrate copy of something much better. I want to emphasize the simple physical truth of things, the absolute primacy of the material life, rather than the spiritual or the afterlife. [The New York Times interview, 2000] ”

- Philip Pullman

“ I'm trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief... I'm not in the business of offending people. I find the books upholding certain values that I think are important, such as life is immensely valuable and this world is an extraordinarily beautiful place. We should do what we can to increase the amount of wisdom in the world. [Washington Post interview, 19 February 2001] ”

- Philip Pullman

“ 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 mysterious even to ourselves; and furthermore that what we are is only part of us, because identity, unlike "identity", must include what we do. And I think that to find oneself and every aspect of this complexity reduced in the public mind to one property that apparently subsumes all the rest ("gay", "black", "Muslim", whatever) is to be the victim of a piece of extraordinary intellectual vulgarity. ”

- Philip Pullman

“ You are so young, Lyra, too young to understand this, but I shall tell you anyway and you'll understand it later: 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 racked with pain. We bear their children, who are witches if they are female, human if not; and then in the blink of an eye they are gone, felled, slain, lost. Our sons, too. When a little boy is growing, he thinks he is immortal. His mother knows he isn't. Each time becomes more painful, until finally your heart is broken. Perhaps that is when YambeAkka comes for you. She is older than the tundra. Perhaps, for her, witches' lives are as brief as men's are to us. ”

- Philip Pullman
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