564 Quotes by philip pullman

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.

Tolkien seems to me reactionary, conservative, fearful of a modern world. Fearful of anything that isn’t sanctioned by the passage of long eons of time. I think what I’m doing in His Dark Materials is politically the reverse of that.

And for most of that time, wisdom has had to work in secret, whispering her words, moving like a spy through the humble places of the world while the courts and palaces are occupied by her enemies.

She has committed great sins, but they’ve been forgiven, and that’s why she loves so deeply.

He was never the creator. He was an angel like ourselves – the first angel, true, the most powerful, but he was formed of Dust as we are, and Dust is only a name for what happens when matter begins to understand itself. Matter loves matter. It seeks to know more about itself, and Dust is formed.

I stay here and drink spirits because the men here took my armor away, and without that, I can hunt seals but I can’t go to war; and I am an armored bear; war is the sea I swim in and the air I breathe.

It was difficult to tell them the truth when a lie would have been so much easier for them to understand.

Once we use the word spiritual, we don’t have to explain anymore, because it belongs to the Church then, and no one can question it.

I’m for open-mindedness and tolerance. I’m against any form of fanaticism, fundamentalism or zealotry, and this certainty of ‘We have the truth.’ The truth is far too large and complex. Nobody has the truth.