Philip Pullman · 405 pages
Rating: (19.3K votes)
“Finally, I’d say to anyone who wants to tell these tales, don’t be afraid to be superstitious. If you have a lucky pen, use it. If you speak with more force and wit when wearing one red sock and one blue one, dress like that. When I’m at work I’m highly superstitious. My own superstition has to do with the voice in which the story comes out. I believe that every story is attended by its own sprite, whose voice we embody when we tell the tale, and that we tell it more successfully if we approach the sprite with a certain degree of respect and courtesy. These sprites are both old and young, male and female, sentimental and cynical, sceptical and credulous, and so on, and what’s more, they’re completely amoral: like the air-spirits who helped Strong Hans escape from the cave, the story-sprites are willing to serve whoever has the ring, whoever is telling the tale. To the accusation that this is nonsense, that all you need to tell a story is a human imagination, I reply, ‘Of course, and this is the way my imagination works.”
― Philip Pullman, quote from Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm: A New English Version
“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, quote from Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm: A New English Version
“Princess, princess, youngest daughter,
Open up and let me in!
Or else your promise by the water
Isn’t worth a rusty pin.
Keep your promise, royal daughter,
Open up and let me in!”
― Philip Pullman, quote from Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm: A New English Version
“He sat down and collected his thoughts. They were quite easy to collect, because there weren't very many of them, and they all concerned the same subject--what a burden his life was.”
― Philip Pullman, quote from Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm: A New English Version
“the particular plant longed for by the wife, which was originally parsley, was a well-known abortifacient.”
― Philip Pullman, quote from Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm: A New English Version
“Much ingenious interpretation of story is little more than seeing pleasing patterns in the sparks of a fire, but it does no harm.”
― Philip Pullman, quote from Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm: A New English Version
“and she saw a bed of lamb’s lettuce, or rapunzel.”
― Philip Pullman, quote from Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm: A New English Version
Philip Pullman
Born place: in Norwich, Norfolk, England, The United Kingdom
Born date October 19, 1946
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“I growled and then slapped him.
"Hey!" His hand pressed to his cheek.
"You always say that when I slap you," I said.
"I think it's a problem that you know what I say when you slap me," he said. "That's not the kind of intimacy I'm looking for.”
― Andrea Cremer, quote from Bloodrose
“My grandfather used to say: Life is astoundingly short. To me, looking back over it, life seems so foreshortened that I scarcely understand, for instance, how a young man can decide to ride over to the next village without being afraid that -not to mention accidents- even the span of a normal happy life may fall far short of the time needed for such a journey.”
― Franz Kafka, quote from The Complete Stories
“Which is a sad thing when you're only seventeen.”
― Cinda Williams Chima, quote from The Exiled Queen
“Zombie Sky. No: Zombies of the Eclipse. Zombies of the Occultation. Occult Zombies from the Planet Moon!”
― Guillermo del Toro, quote from The Strain
“I felt as if I learned a few things. I learned that it's sometimes okay to think like a weenie, so long as you don't act like one—at least not all the time. I learned that it's okay to be wrong, as long as you can admit it and are willing to listen to those who may know better.”
― D.J. MacHale, quote from The Merchant of Death
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