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
“Real life is only ever just real life. Messy. What it means depends on how you look at it. The only thing you’ve got to do is find a way to live there.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from More Than This
“Where shadows dim with shadows mate,
in caverns deep and dark.
Where old books dream of bygone days,
when they were wood and bark...”
― Walter Moers, quote from The City of Dreaming Books
“Good-bye, Harry, wherever you may be … never has it been more clear to me that the part of my life which you occupied is over forever … I could not be further away from you if I were on the moon … how odd to think of one’s life not as chapters in a book but as complete volumes, separate and distinct.”
― Jim Fergus, quote from One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd
“Love sucks. Sometimes it feels good. Sometimes it’s just another way to bleed.”
― Laurell K. Hamilton, quote from Blue Moon
“There is no shame in loving: it is the sign of a generous heart, and pain the price of an open soul.”
― Alison Croggon, quote from The Naming
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