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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.
Philip Pullman
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Philip Pullman
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: October 19
Audiobook Narrator
Executive Producer
Film Writer
Librarian
Novelist
Playwright
University Teacher
Writer
Norwich
Norfolk
Sir Philip Pullman
Philosophy
Ways
Take
Many
Snuffed
Way
Candles
Never
Candle
Like
Existed
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More quotes by Philip Pullman
Both the Oblation Board and the Specters of Indifference are bewitched by this truth about human beings: that innocence is different from experience. The Oblation Board fears and hates Dust, and the Specters feast on it, but it's Dust both of them are obsessed by.
Philip Pullman
The state of mind which I put myself when I tell a story is one in which superstition flourishes very easily. And I welcome that because it helps me.
Philip Pullman
One moment several things are possible, the next moment only one happens, and the rest don't exist. Except that other worlds have sprung into being, on which the did happen.
Philip Pullman
We feel cold, but we don't mind it, because we will not come to harm. And if we wrapped up against the cold, we wouldn't feel other things, like the bright tingle of the stars, or the music of the aurora, or best of all the silky feeling of moonlight on our skin. It's worth being cold for that.
Philip Pullman
Religion grants its adherents malign, intoxicating and morally corrosive sensations. Destroying intellectual freedom is always evil, but only religion makes doing evil feel quite so good.
Philip Pullman
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.
Philip Pullman
She longed for cutlasses, pistols, and brandy she had to make do with coffee, and pencils, and verbs.
Philip Pullman
If you can't think of what to write, tough luck write anyway.
Philip Pullman
What I couldn't help noticing was that I learned more about the novel in a morning by trying to write a page of one than I'd learned in seven years or so of trying to write criticism
Philip Pullman
...because where we are is always the most important place.
Philip Pullman
Lonely? I don't know. They tell me this is cold. I don't know what cold is, because I don't freeze. So I don't know what lonely means either. Bears are made to be solitary.
Philip Pullman
A professional writer is someone who writes just as well when they're not inspired as when they are.
Philip Pullman
All the history of human life has been a struggle between wisdom and stupidity.
Philip Pullman
I'm for open-mindedness and tolerance. I'm against any form of fanaticism, fundamentalism or zealotry, and this certainty of 'We have the truth.' The truth is far too large and complex. Nobody has the truth.
Philip Pullman
A lot of modernism does seem to come out of a fear of being thought an ordinary storyteller. So they tell it backwards and they tell it in the present tense and they cut loose the pages and shuffle them around - all that kind of stuff.
Philip Pullman
You'll drift apart, it's true, but you'll be out in the open, part of everything alive again.
Philip Pullman
Religion begins in story. Yes, it does, because religion is an attempt to make sense of what is incomprehensible to us, what is inexplicable, what is awe-inspiring, what is frightening, what moves us to great wonder, and so on. That is the religious impulse, and it is part of our psychological makeup -- of everyone's psychological makeup.
Philip Pullman
But 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 of things that couldn't be imagined without it.
Philip Pullman
We are all subject to the fates. But we must act as if we are not, or die of despair.
Philip Pullman
One curious thing about growing up is that you don't only move forward in time you move backwards as well, as pieces of your parents' and grandparents' lives come to you.
Philip Pullman