Quotes from Philip Pullman

Everything about this is embarrassing she said. D'you know how embarrassing it is to mention good and evil in a scientific laboratory? Have you any idea? One of the reasons I became a scientist was not to have to think about that kind of thing.

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.

How can knowing something be sinful?

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

But it didn't seem to Lyra that she would ever grow up.

Good and Evil are names for what people do, not for what they are...stopped believing there was a power of good and evil. That they were outside of us...People are too complicated for labels.

Lyra had to adjust to her new sense of her own story, and that couldn't be done in a day.

I bet you could catch bullets," she said, and threw the stick away. "How do you do that?" "By not being human," he said. "That's why you could never trick a bear. We see tricks and deceit as plain as arms and legs. We can see in a way humans have forgotten. But you know about this; you can understand the symbol reader.

Who are you? the woman said at last. Lyra Silver— No, where d'you come from? What are you? How do you know things like this? Wearily Lyra sighed; she had forgotten how roundabout Scholars could be. It was difficult to tell them the truth when a lie would have been so much easier for them to understand.

She was afraid of John Faa, and what she was most afraid of was his kindness.

There is time, and there is beyond time. History belongs to time, but truth belongs to what is beyond time. In writing of things as they should have been, you are letting truth into history. You are the word of God.

Eve was tempted not by wealth or love but by knowledge.

We'll find a way. There is a way. We just don't know it yet. Don't stop….

The Lord of the Rings' is fundamentally an infantile work. Tolkien is not interested in the way grownup, adult human beings interact with each other. He's interested in maps and plans and languages and codes.

war is the sea I swim in and the air I breathe.

Just as she was unaware of the hidden currents of politics running below the surface of College affairs, so the Scholars, for their part, would have been unable to see the rich seething stew of alliances and enmities and feuds and treaties which was a child's life in Oxford. Children playing together: how pleasant to see! What could be more innocent and charming?

War asks many people to do unreasonable things.

What is the world of the spirits? It is nothing I know about. I don't know what spirit is. Spirit is what matter does.

for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return

Will considered what to do. 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 the moment all Will's choices existed at once. But to keep them all in existence meant doing nothing. He had to choose, after all.

Still, Fritz was an optimist, and Karl was a pessimist, and that makes all the difference in the world.

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.

That's the duty of the old," said the Librarian, "to be anxious on behalf of the young. And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old.

A human being with no daemon was like someone without a face, or with their ribs laid open and their heart torn out; something unnatural and uncanny that belonged to the world of nightghasts, not the waking world of sense.