Quotes from Philip Pullman

Much ingenious interpretation of story is little more than seeing pleasing patterns in the sparks of a fire, but it does no harm.

Another crack, and this time the bullet went deep somewhere inside, seeking out the centre of his life. He thought: it won't find it there. Hester's my centre.

Everything means something," Lyra said severely. "We just have to find out how to read it.

You scribes and Pharisees, if you're listening – be damned to you. You take endless scruples over the tiniest matters of the law, while you let the great things like justice and mercy and faith go unnoticed and forgotten. You strain the gnats out of your wine, but you ignore the camel standing in it.

there are few natural philosophers as frustrated as astronomers in a fog.

with no more weight than a shadow.

What is he? A friend or an enemy? The alethiometer answered: He is a murderer.

All the time I was away, Lyra said, I never thought about that. All I thought about was just the time I was in, just the present. There were plenty of times when I thought I didn't get a future at all. And now... Well, suddenly finding I've got a whole life to live, but no...but no idea what to do with it, well, it's like having the alethiometer but no idea how to read it.

The two dark figures of the bene elim has not moved. But they spoke: You must come with us now. Lord Asriel needs you at once. The enemy's power is growing every minute. The shaman has told you what your task is. Follow us and help us win. Come with us. Come this way. Come now. And Will looked from them to Lyra's rucksack and back again, and he didn't hear a word they said.

The wave function of this situation is going to collapse quite soon.

The Dust pouring down from the stars had found a living home again, and these children-no-longer-children, saturated with love, were the cause of it all.

But he might have had a bang on the head! said Joan. Poor little boy, he thinks he was a rat! Hmm, said the receptionist, and wrote rodent delusion on a pink slip of paper.

Labour without joy is base. Labour without sorrow is base. Sorrow without labour is base. Joy without labour is base. • JOHN RUSKIN

Lyra's heart, revulsion struggled with compassion, and compassion won. She put her arms around the skinny little form to hold him safe.

He meant the Kingdom was over, the Kingdom of Heaven, it was all finished. We shouldn't live as if it mattered more than this life in this world, because where we are is always the most important place.

And if we - later on - she was whispering shakily, If we meet someone we like, and if we marry them, then we must be good to them, and not make comparisons all the time and wish we were married to each other instead...But just keep coming here once a year, just for an hour, just to be together...

Then excuse me, Miss Silver, but they have separated their intelligences from their other faculties. And that is not an intelligent thing to do.

Rooks were cawing somewhere, and bells were ringing, and from the oxpens the steady beat of a gas engine announced the ascent of the evening Royal Mail zeppelin for London.

To be sure, there's a warm passion behind what you say. But if you give in to that passion, friends, you're a doing what I always warned you agin: you're a placing the satisfaction of your own feelings above the work you have to do.

human life is difficult; there are profundities and compromises and mysteries that look to the innocent eye like betrayal.

But if we get education right... it would acknowledge that the path to true learning begins nowhere else but in delight, and the words on the signpost say: "Once upon a time … - Isis lecture, 2003

Everyone's dæmon instantly became warlike: each child was accompanied by fangs, or claws, or bristling fur, and Pantalaimon, contemptuous of the limited imaginations of these gyptian demons, became a dragon the size of a deer-hound.

think of Adam and Eve like an imaginary number, like the square root of minus one: you can never see any concrete proof that it exists, but if you include it in your equations, you can calculate all manner

To ask the question and wait for the answer is to know that there will be no answer.