Quotes About Growth

Lyra learns to her great cost that fantasy isn't enough. She has been lying all her life, telling stories to people, making up fantasies, and suddenly she comes to a point where that's not enough. All she can do is tell the truth. She tells the truth about her childhood, about the experiences she had in Oxford, and that is what saves her. True experience, not fantasy - reality, not lies - is what saves us in the end.

your reading will be even better then, after a lifetime of thought and effort, because it will come from conscious understanding. Grace attained like that is deeper and fuller than grace that comes freely, and furthermore, once you've gained it, it will never leave you.

You cannot change what you are, only what you do

For a human being, nothing comes naturally," said Grumman. "We have to learn everything we do.

and she saw a bed of lamb's lettuce, or rapunzel.

And when Rusakov discovered Dust, at last there was physical proof that something happened when innocence changed into experience.

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 so accusingly, as if it was something to blame her for. "I used to be young," was all she could find to say.

I lied and lied, Asriel… Let's not wait too long, I can't bear it… We won't live, will we? We won't survive like the ghosts?" "Not if we fall into the abyss. We came here to give Lyra time to find her dæmon, and then time to live and grow up. If we take Metatron to extinction, Marisa, she'll have that time, and if we go with him, it doesn't matter.

eighteenth century. It had never been planned; it had grown piecemeal, with past and present overlapping at every spot, and the final effect was one of jumbled and squalid grandeur.

some of what's good has to hurt us a little

There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children's book. - Carnegie Medal Acceptance Speech

There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children's book.

Themes that are too large for adult fiction can only be dealt with adequately in a children's book - Philip Pullman (Hunt and Lenz, 2001, p. 122 as cited by Hunt, 2005, p. 204)

In my childhood I led the life of a sage, when I grew up I started climbing trees

Good Christ, a Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy till they die!

I was still too much of a fledgling with people to understand that, in the long run, nobody is a picnic and that I was no picnic myself.

What use to skip those two grades in grammar school and get such a jump on everybody else, when the result is to wind up so far behind?

My God, he thought, the man I once was! The life that surrounded me! The force that was mine! No otherness to be felt anywhere! Once upon a time I was a full human being.

If anybody asks, 'Can you do this job? Can you handle it?' you tell 'em 'Absolutely.' By the time they find out that you can't, you'll have already learned, and the job'll be yours. And who knows, it might just turn out to be the opportunity of a lifetime.

you will make mistakes on a scale you can't even dream of now—because there is no other way to reach the end.

The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong.

Gone were the days when Zuckerman had only to worry about Zuckerman making money: henceforth he would have to worry about his money making money.

I left the front stoop on Leslie Street, ate of the fruit of the tree of fiction, and nothing, neither reality nor myself, has been the same since.

Now that he was no longer grounded in his hate, we were going to talk about women.