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And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are. All we can say is that this is a good deed, because it helps someone or that's an evil one because it hurts them. People are too complicated to have simple labels.

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
Someone
Deeds
Believe
Complicated
Good
Hurt
People
Came
Names
Deed
Simple
Hurts
Evil
Labels
Helping
Helps

More quotes by Philip Pullman

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Symbols and emblems were everywhere. Buildings and pictures were designed to be read like books. Everything stood for something else if you had the right dictionary, you could read Nature itself. It was hardly surprising to find philosophers using the symbolism of their time to interpret knowledge that came from a mysterious source.
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You don't read it in the sense of reading a message it doesn't work like that. What's happening is that the Shadows are responding to the attention you pay them.
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You'll drift apart, it's true, but you'll be out in the open, part of everything alive again.
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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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Literary modernism kind of grew out of a sense that, “Oh my god! I’m telling a story! Oh, that can’t be the case, because I’m a clever person. I’m a literary person! What am I going to do to distinguish myself? I know! I’ll write Ulysses.”
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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.
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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.
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When he'd sworn at her and been sworn at in return, they became great friends.
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There's a hunger for stories in all of us, adults too. We need stories so much that we're even willing to read bad books to get them, if the good books won't supply them.
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All writing is difficult. The most you can hope for is a day when it goes reasonably easily. Plumbers don't get plumber's block, and doctors don't get doctor's block why should writers be the only profession that gives a special name to the difficulty of working, and then expects sympathy for it?
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All the history of human life has been a struggle between wisdom and stupidity.
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Life is hard . . . but we cling to it all the same
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All stories teach, whether the storyteller intends them to or not. They teach the world we create. They teach the morality we live by. They teach it much more effectively than moral precepts and instructions.
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I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are.
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And barely ten minutes later the soft sound of wingbeats came to their ears, and Balthamos stood up eagerly. The next moment, the two angels were embracing, and Will, gazing into the flames, saw their mutual affection. More than affection: they loved each other with a passion.
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The Lord of the Rings' is fundamentally an infantile work. Tolkien is not interested in the way grownup, adult human beings interact with each other. He's interested in maps and plans and languages and codes.
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You speak of destiny as if it was fixed.
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So Lyra and her daemon turned away from the world they were born in, and looked toward the sun, and walked into the sky.
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If you want to write anything that works, you have to go with the grain of your talent, not against it. If your talent is inert and sullen in the face of business or politics...but takes fire at the thought of ghosts and vampires and witches and demons then feed the flames, feed the flames.
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