564 Quotes by philip pullman

We need to imagine as well as measure.

You won’t understand anything about the imagination until you realise that it’s not about making things up, it’s about perception.

Had reason ever created a poem, or a symphony, or a painting? If rationality can’t see things like the secret commonwealth, it’s because rationality’s vision is limited. The secret commonwealth is there. We can’t see it with rationality any more than we can weigh something with a microscope: it’s the wrong sort of instrument. We need to imagine as well as measure ...

You're in a world full of color and you want to see it in black and white.

I write almost always in the third person, and I don't think the narrator is male or female anyway. They're both, and young and old, and wise and silly, and sceptical and credulous, and innocent and experienced, all at once. Narrators are not even human - they're sprites.

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

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.

With every second that went past, with every sentence she spoke, she felt a little strength flowing back. And now that she was doing something difficult and familiar and never quite predictable, namely lying, she felt a sort of mastery again, the same sense of complexity and control that the alethiometer gave her. She had to be careful not to say anything obviously impossible; she had to be vague in some places and invent plausible details in others; she had to be an artist, in short.

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