564 Quotes by philip pullman

The justice of it seems to children correct and right – I mean, we laugh at it! We underestimate children’s ability to know what is a story and what isn’t.

In some lights they were hardly there at all, just visible as a drifting quality in the light, a rhythmic evanescence, like veils of transparency turning before a mirror.

Lyra bent over the open vessel and found the concentrated fragrance of every rose that had ever bloomed: a sweetness and power so profound that it moved beyond sweetness altogether and out of the other side of its own complexity into a realm of clear and simple purity and beauty. It was the smell of sunlight itself.

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. At that moment all Will’s choices existed at once. But to keep them all in existence meant doing nothing. He had to choose, after all.

Well, I have an idea, usually a visual image of some sort. A setting. A particular, I don’t know, urban scene, a particular time of day. Something that grips my imagination for some reason.

Hope holds you fast like an anchor so you don’t give way.

Iorek Byrnison: Can is not the same as must. Lyra Silvertongue: But if you must and you can, then there’s no excuse.

Sticks and stones, I’ll break yer bones, but names ain’t worth a quarrel.

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