Quotes from Philip Pullman

At one point he seemed to be showing the moon to Lyra, pointing up at it and holding her so she could see, or perhaps he was showing Lyra to the moon; at any rate he looked like a lord in his own domain, with nothing to fear and all the silvery night to enjoy.

Whenever you turn your head, your deaths dodge behind you. Wherever you look, they hide. They hide in a teacup. Or in a dewdrop. Or in a breath of wind.

We need to imagine as well as measure.

You used to be optimistic. You used to think that whatever we did would turn out well. Even after we came back from the north, you used to think that. Now you're cautious, you're anxious… You're pessimistic. She knew he was right, but it wasn't right that he should speak to her accusingly, as if it was something to blame her for. I used to be young, was all she could find to say.

consciousness is a perfectly normal property of matter, like mass or anbaric charge; that there is a field of consciousness which pervades the entire universe, and which makes itself apparent most fully – we believe – in human beings.

There's some that came here never believing they were dead. They insisted all the way that they were alive, it was a mistake, someone would have to pay; made no difference. There's others who longed to be dead when they were alive, poor souls; lives full of pain or misery; killed themselves for a chance of a blessed rest, and found that nothing had changed except for the worse, and this time there was no escape; you can't make yourself alive again.

Shame on you! Think what this child has done! You might not have more courage, but you should be ashamed to show less.

Does he think the job of a librarian is so simple, so empty of content, that anyone can step up and do it for a thank-you and a cup of tea? Does he think that all a librarian does is to tidy the shelves?

Like two moths clumsily bumping together, with no more weight than that, their lips touched. Then before they knew how it happened, they were clinging together, blindly pressing their faces towards each other.

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.

But I know that all the things I do know are very small compared with the things that I don't know

he came awake like someone struggling to swim to the surface of a lake of laudanum, where the strongest delights were the deepest and there was nothing above but cold and fear and duty.

He sat down and collected his thoughts. They were quite easy to collect, because there weren't very many of them, and they all concerned the same subject--what a burden his life was.

But there had always been ghosts in the mountains, everyone knew that.

Must is not the same as can, Lyra'. 'But if you must and you can, then there's no excuse!

It's about wrong and less wrong. Bad and less bad.

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.

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

Your death taps you on the shoulder, or takes your hand, and says, 'Come along o' me, it's time.

She turned away. Behind them lay pain and death and fear; ahead of them lay doubt, and danger, and fathomless mysteries. But they weren't alone. So Lyra and her dæmon turned away from the world they were born in, and looked toward the sun, and walked into the sky.

Asriel was a tall man with powerful shoulders, a fierce dark face, and eyes that seemed to flash and glitter with savage laughter. It was a face to be dominated by, or to fight: never a face to patronize or pity. All his movements were large and perfectly balanced, like those of a wild animal, and when he appeared in a room like this, he seemed a wild animal held in a cage too small for it.

in writing like this, he was letting truth from beyond time into history, and thus making history the handmaid of posterity and not its governor...

You en't gyptian, Lyra. You might pass for gyptian with practice, but there's more to us than gyptian language. There's deeps in us and strong currents. We're water people all through, and you en't, you're a fire person. What you're most like is marsh fire, that's the place you have in the gyptian scheme. You got witch oil in your soul. Deceptive, that's what you are child.

There is time, and there is what is beyond time. There is darkness, and there is light. There is the world and the flesh, and there is God.