564 Quotes by philip pullman

The world is a cruel place sometimes, and warm-hearted people do most of the good in it. And much of the time, they’re mocked and scorned for their pains.

Whatever happened behind now was simply that: behind. Lyra had left it. She felt she was leaving the world altogether, so remote and intent she was, so high they were climbing, so strange and uncanny was the light that bathed them.

Where did this love come from? I don’t know; it came to me like a thief in the night, and now I love her so much my heart is bursting with it.

Thou shalt not might’ reach the head but it takes ‘Once upon a time’ to reach the heart. Also: We need stories so much that we’re even willing to read bad books to get them.

I don’t know where my ideas come from, but I know where they come to. They come to my desk, and if I’m not there, they go away again.

Of all the dangers that threaten us at the beginning of the third millennium – the degradation of the environment, the increasing undemocratic power of the great corporations, the continuing threats to peace in regions full of decaying nuclear weapons, and so on – one of the biggest dangers of all comes from fundamentalist religion... From the Christian conservatives in the USA to the Taliban in Afghanistan.

That is a question with too complicated an answer.

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.

For every once upon a time there must be a story to follow, because if a story doesn’t, something else will, and it might not be as harmless as a story.