Quotes by Philip Pullman

It was such a strange tormenting feeling when your daemon was pulling at the link between you; part physical pain deep in the chest, part intense sadness and love. Everyone tested it when they were growing up: seeing how far they could pull apart, coming back with intense relief.

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

All writing is difficult. The most you can hope for is a day when it goes reasonably easily. Plumbers don’t get plumber’s block, and doctors don’t get doctor’s block; why should writers be the only profession that gives a special name to the difficulty of working, and then expects sympathy for it?

Seems to me- Lee said, feeling for the words, seems to me the place you fight cruelty is where you find it, and the place you give help is where you see it needed....

You going to be a scientist when you grow up?” That sort of question deserved a blank stare, which it got.

The Specters feast as vampires feast on blood, but the Specters’ food is attention. A conscious and informed interest in the world. The immaturity of children is less attractive to them.

I’m with the fool in the psalm. You thought we could get on without you; no – you didn’t care whether we got on without you or not. You just got up and left. So that’s what we’re doing, we’re getting on.

A few minutes after he arrived, Lee was talking to a group of astronomers eager to learn what news he could bring them, for there are few natural philosophers as frustrated as astronomers in a fog.

Ruta Skadi was four hundred and sixteen years old, with all the pride and knowledge of an adult witch queen. She was wiser by far than any short-lived human, but she had not the slightest idea of how like a child she seemed beside these ancient beings. Nor did she know how far their awareness spread out beyond her like filamentary tentacles to the remotest corners of universes she had never dreamed of; nor that she saw them as human-formed only because her eyes expected to. If she were to perceive their true form, they would seem more like architecture than organism, like huge structures composed of intelligence and feeling.But they expected nothing else: she was very young.

She shook her head and whispered, No. No! That cant be true. Impossible!You think things have to be possible? Things have to be true!

All she knew was that she must be in love with someone, or she wouldnt feel so miserable.

The children will come to no harm.Except for the older ones. Like that poor kid down there.Mr. Scoresby, that is the way this world works. And if you want to put an end to cruelty and injustice, you must take me farther on. I have a job to do.Seems to me— Lee said, feeling for the words, seems to me the place you fight cruelty is where you find it, and the place you give help is where you see it needed.

Blake said Milton was a true poet and of the Devils party without knowing it. I am of the Devils party and know it.

She found out that having something to do prevented you from feeling seasick, and that even a job like scrubbing a deck could be satisfying, if it was done in a seamanlike way. She was very taken with this notion, and later on she folded the blankets on her bunk in a seamanlike way, and put her possessions in the closet in a seamanlike way, and used stow instead of tidy for the process of doing so. After two days at sea, Lyra decided that this was the life for her.

I’m working on another Lyra book right now – it’s called The Book of Dust.“It’s going very well and it will be finished when I write the words ‘The End’.

The evening sky was awash with peach, apricot, cream: tender little ice-cream clouds in a wide orange sky.

What work do I have to do then? said Will, but went on at once, No, on second thought, dont tell me. I shall decide what I do. If you say my work is fighting, or healing, or exploring, or whatever you might say, Ill always be thinking about it. And if I do end up doing that, Ill be resentful because itll feel as if I didnt have a choice, and if I dont do it, Ill feel guilty because I should. Whatever I do, I will choose it, no one else.

she allowed herself to dwell on the cause of this strange, apprehensive exultation that she sensed flickering at the edge of her mind: it was the rarest thing of all - a man whom she knew at once, and without any qualification, to be her equal.

Princess, princess, youngest daughter,Open up and let me in!Or else your promise by the waterIsn’t worth a rusty pin.Keep your promise, royal daughter,Open up and let me in!

The fairy tale is in a perpetual state of becoming and alteration. To keep to one version or one translation alone is to put robin redbreast in a cage.