Quote

If a witch needs something, another witch will give it to her. If there is war to be fought, we don't consider cost one of the factors in deciding whether or not it is right to fight. Nor do we have any notion of honor. An insult to a bear is a deadly thing. To us...inconceivable. How could you insult a witch? What would it matter if you did?

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
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Factors
Thing
Whether
Bear
Something
War
Notion
Inconceivable
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Deciding
Give
Bears
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Matter
Honor
Witch
Right
Cost
Fought
Giving
Fight
Insult

More quotes by Philip Pullman

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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.
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What I do say is that I can write verse, and that the writing of verse in strict form is the best possible training for writing good prose
Philip Pullman
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That's the duty of the old, to be anxious on behalf of the young. And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old.
Philip Pullman
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I'm perfectly happy about being superstitious and atheistic.
Philip Pullman
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I look at the state of the American politics and I scratch my head in wonder. How can the Republican Party, any party, have fallen into to such a state of self-destructiveness - self-destructive stupidity? How is it possible? I don't know. It's an absolute mystery to me.
Philip Pullman
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I write almost always in the third person, and I don't think the narrator is male or female anyway. They're both, and young and old, and wise and silly, and sceptical and credulous, and innocent and experienced, all at once. Narrators are not even human - they're sprites.
Philip Pullman
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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.
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It's only through honesty and courage that science can work at all. The Ptolemaic understanding of the solar system was undermined and corrected by the constant pressure of more and more honest reporting.
Philip Pullman
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We shouldn't live as if [other worlds] mattered more than this life in this world, because where we are is always the most important place.
Philip Pullman
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I don't see any sign of God in this world, in the place where we live and things we know. It can all be explained to my mind perfectly satisfactorily without God. But in the great darkness beyond this little spark of light where I live, of course there may be all kinds of things. There may be a god. So I'm really an agnostic.
Philip Pullman
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I practiced on the greatest model of storytelling we've got, which is The Iliad and The Odyssey. I told those stories many, many times.
Philip Pullman
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Being in love was like China: you knew it was there, and no doubt it was very interesting, and some people went there, but I never would.
Philip Pullman
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The book is second only to the wheel as the best piece of technology human beings have ever invented. A book symbolises the whole intellectual history of mankind it's the greatest weapon ever devised in the war against stupidity.
Philip Pullman
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We need to ensure that children are not forced to waste their time on barren rubbish.
Philip Pullman
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I got a book token for Christmas and exchanged it for a book called A History of Art, and that book (which I still have-battered and falling to pieces) became more precious to me than any Bible.
Philip Pullman
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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.
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Marisa! Marisa!” The cry was torn from Lord Asriel, and with the snow leopard beside her, with a roaring in her ears, Lyra’s mother stood and found her footing and leapt with all her heart, to hurl herself against the angel and her daemon and her dying lover, and seize those beating wings, and bear them all down together into the abyss.
Philip Pullman
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We measure the value of a civilized society by the number of # libraries it opens, not the number it closes down.
Philip Pullman
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But I know that all the things I do know are very small compared with the things that I don't know.
Philip Pullman
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Looking at them now, thought Jim, you'd never believe they weren't in love with each other, and not with a hopeless, doomed obsession like poor Isabel Meredith. This was what love ought to be like: playful and passionate and teasing, and dangerous, too, with sharp intelligence in it.
Philip Pullman