{"author":"Philip Pullman","author_id":"Philip+Pullman","total_quotes":115,"quotes":[{"text":"Maybe sometimes we don't do the right thing because the wrong thing looks more dangerous, and we don't want to look scared, so we go and do the wrong thing just because it's dangerous. We're more concerned with not looking scared than with judging right.","author":"Philip Pullman","tags":["fear","philosophy"],"id":6964,"author_id":"Philip+Pullman"},{"text":"I feel with some passion that what we truly are is private, and almost infinitely complex, and ambiguous, and both external and internal, and double- or triple- or multiply natured, and largely mysterious even to ourselves; and furthermore that what we are is only part of us, because identity, unlike 'identity', must include what we do. And I think that to find oneself and every aspect of this complexity reduced in the public mind to one property that apparently subsumes all the rest ('gay', 'black', 'Muslim', whatever) is to be the victim of a piece of extraordinary intellectual vulgarity.","author":"Philip Pullman","tags":["equality","identity","wisdom"],"id":8267,"author_id":"Philip+Pullman"},{"text":"The Specters feast as vampires feast on blood, but the Specters’ food is attention. A conscious and informed interest in the world. The immaturity of children is less attractive to them.","author":"Philip Pullman","tags":["kindlehighlight"],"id":11345,"author_id":"Philip+Pullman"},{"text":"When you look at what C.S. Lewis is saying, his message is so anti-life, so cruel, so unjust. The view that the Narnia books have for the material world is one of almost undisguised contempt. At one point, the old professor says, ‘It’s all in Plato’ — meaning that the physical world we see around us is the crude, shabby, imperfect, second-rate copy of something much better. I want to emphasize the simple physical truth of things, the absolute primacy of the material life, rather than the spiritual or the afte.","author":"Philip Pullman","tags":["basis","beauty","belief","book","books","children-s-books","offense","philip-pullman","value","wisdom","young-adult"],"id":15489,"author_id":"Philip+Pullman"},{"text":"You don't win races by wishing, you win them by running faster than everyone else does.","author":"Philip Pullman","tags":["inspirational","life"],"id":18041,"author_id":"Philip+Pullman"},{"text":"There’s been terrible things we seen, en’t there? And more a coming, more’n likely. So I think I’d rather not know what’s in the future. I’ll stick to the present.","author":"Philip Pullman","tags":["child","future","philosophy","present"],"id":18389,"author_id":"Philip+Pullman"},{"text":"Lord, if I thought you were listening, I'd pray for this above all: that any church set up in your name should remain poor, and powerless, and modest. That it should wield no authority except that of love. That it should never cast anyone out. That it should own no property and make no laws. That it should not condemn, but only forgive. That it should be not like a palace with marble walls and polished floors, and guards standing at the door, but like a tree with its roots deep in the soil, that shelters every kind of bird and beast and gives blossom in the spring and shade in the hot sun and fruit in the season, and in time gives up its good sound wood for the carpenter; but that sheds many thousands of seeds so that new trees can grow in its place. Does the tree say to the sparrow, 'Get out, you don't belong here?' Does the tree say to the hungry man, 'This fruit is not for you?' Does the tree test the loyalty of the beasts before it allows them into the shade?","author":"Philip Pullman","tags":["love","religion"],"id":23144,"author_id":"Philip+Pullman"},{"text":"But Balthamos couldn't tell; he only knew that half his heart had been extinguished. He couldn't keep still: he flew up again, scouring the sky as if to seek out Baruch in this cloud or that, calling, crying, calling; and then he'd be overcome with guilt, and fly down to urge Will to hide and keep quiet, and promise to watch over him tirelessly; and then the pressure of his grief would crush him to the ground, and he'd remember every instance of kindness and courage that Baruch had ever shown, and there were thousands, and he'd forgotten none of them; and he'd cry that a nature so gracious could ever be snuffed out, and he'd soar into the skies again, casting about in every direction, reckless and wild and stricken, cursing the air, the clouds, the stars.","author":"Philip Pullman","tags":["grief"],"id":23836,"author_id":"Philip+Pullman"},{"text":"When we were alive, they told us that when we died we'd go to heaven. And they said that heaven was a place of joy and glory and we would spend eternity in the company of saints and angels praising the Almighty, in a state of bliss. That's what they said. And that's what led some of us to give our lives, and others to spend years in solitary prayer, while all the joy of life was going to waste around us and we never knew. Because the land of the dead isn't a place of reward or a place of punishment, it is a place of nothing. The good come here as well as the wicked, and all of us languish in this gloom forever, with no hope of freedom, or joy, or sleep, or rest, or peace. But now this child has come offering us a way out and I'm going to follow her. Even if it means oblivion, friends, I'll welcome it, because it won't be nothing. We'll be alive again in a thousand blades of grass, and a million leaves; we'll be falling in the raindrops and blowing in the fresh breeze; we'll be glistening in the dew under the stars and the moon out there in the physical world, which is our true home and always was.","author":"Philip Pullman","tags":["afterlife","death","life"],"id":35263,"author_id":"Philip+Pullman"},{"text":"Maybe art itself was a kind of voodoo, possessing you, giving you supernatural power, letting you see in the dark.","author":"Philip Pullman","tags":["art"],"id":40657,"author_id":"Philip+Pullman"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":115,"pages":12,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}