Philip Pullman - The Subtle Knife (1997)

35 Sourced Quotes

View all Philip Pullman Quotes
Argue with anything else, but don't argue with your own nature.

Philip Pullman
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.

Philip Pullman
Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit.

Philip Pullman
Seems to me the place you fight cruelty is where you find it, and the place you give help is where you see it needed.

Philip Pullman
For a human being, nothing comes naturally, said Grumman. We have to learn everything we do.

Philip Pullman
It was all very well, the alethiometer telling her to be truthful, but she knew what would happen if she told the whole truth. She had to tread carefully and just avoid direct lies.

Philip Pullman
Seems to me-" Lee said, feeling for the words, "seems to me the place you fight cruelty is where you find it, and the place you give help is where you see it needed....

Philip Pullman
People here cannot conceive of worlds where dæmons are a silent voice in the mind and no more. Can you imagine my astonishment, in turn, at learning that part of my own nature was female, and bird-formed, and beautiful?

Philip Pullman
Lyra sighed; she had forgotten how roundabout Scholars could be. It was difficult to tell them the truth when a lie would have been so much easier for them to understand.

Philip Pullman
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.

Philip Pullman
It does not make sense. It cannot exist. It's impossible, and if it isn't impossible, it's irrelevant, and if it isn't either of those things, it's embarrassing.

Philip Pullman
You going to be a scientist when you grow up? That sort of question deserved a blank stare, which it got.

Philip Pullman
The security services are alarmed. Every nation that does research into fundamental physics — what we call experimental theology — is turning to its scientists urgently to discover what's going on. Because they know that something is happening. And they suspect it has to do with other worlds.

Philip Pullman
Will moved on grimly, screwing up his eyes against the glare, ignoring the worsening pain from his hand, and finally reaching a state in which movement alone was good and stillness bad, so that he suffered more from resting than from toiling on. And since the failure of the witches' spell to stop his bleeding, he thought they were regarding him with fear, too, as if he was marked by some curse greater than their own powers.

Philip Pullman
Lord Asriel is just a man, with human power, no more than that. But his ambition is limitless. He dares to do what men and women don't even dare to think.

Philip Pullman
He'd learned that the object of a school fight was not to gain points for style but to force your enemy to give in, which meant hurting him more than he was hurting you. He knew that you had to be willing to hurt someone else, too, and he'd found out that not many people were, when it came to it; but he knew that he was.
So this wasn't unfamiliar to him, but he hadn't fought against a nearly grown man armed with a knife before, and at all costs he must keep the man from picking it up now that he'd dropped it.

Philip Pullman
She felt a nausea of the soul, a hideous and sickening despair, a melancholy weariness so profound that she was going to die of it. Her last conscious thought was disgust at life; her senses had lied to her. The world was not made of energy and delight but of foulness, betrayal, and lassitude. Living was hateful, and death was no better, and from end to end of the universe this was the first and last and only truth.
Thus she stood, bow in hand, indifferent, dead in life.

Philip Pullman
"Now," said Giacomo Paradisi, "here you are, take the knife, it is yours."
"I don't want it," said Will. "I don't want anything to do with it."
"You haven't got the choice," said the old man. "You are the bearer now."
"I thought you said you was," said Lyra.
"My time is over," he said. "The knife knows when to leave one hand and settle in another, and I know how to tell..."

Philip Pullman
Then she was pressing her little proud broken self against his face, as close as she could get, and then they died.

Philip Pullman
On, said the alethiometer. Farther, higher.
So on they climbed.

Philip Pullman
Just sort of relax your mind and say yes, it does hurt, I know. Don't try and shut it out.

Philip Pullman
What Asriel's done has shaken everything up, Mr. Scoresby, shaken it more profoundly than it's ever been shaken before. These doorways and windows that I spoke of — they open in unexpected places now. It's hard to navigate, but this wind is a fair one.

Philip Pullman
Was there only one world after all which spent its time dreaming of others?

Philip Pullman
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.

Philip Pullman
"You have a strange way about you, Dr. Grumman. You ever spend any time among the witches?"
"Yes," said Grumman. "And among academicians, and among spirits. I found folly everywhere, but there were grains of wisdom in every stream of it. No doubt there was much more wisdom that I failed to recognize. Life is hard, Mr. Scoresby, but we cling to it all the same."
"And this journey we're on? Is that folly or wisdom?"
"The greatest wisdom I know."
"Tell me again what your purpose is. You're going to find the bearer of this subtle knife, and what then?"
"Tell him what his task is."
"And that's a task that includes protecting Lyra," the aeronaut reminded him.
"It will protect all of us."

Philip Pullman
Will darted back to the gutter, and picked up the knife, and the fight was over. The young man, cut and battered, clambered up the step, and saw Will standing above him holding the knife; he stared with a sickly anger and then turned and fled.

Philip Pullman
He showed me that to rebel was right and just, when you considered what the agents of the Authority did in His name.... And I thought of the Bolvangar children, and the other terrible mutilitations I have seen in our own southlands; and he told me of many more hideous cruelties dealt out in the Authority's name—of how they capture witches, in some worlds, and burn them alive, sisters. Yes, witches like ourselves...
He opened my eyes. He showed me things I had never seen, cruelties and horrors all committed in the name of the Authority, all designed to destroy the joys and the truthfulness of life.

Philip Pullman
Dark matter is what my research team is looking for. No one knows what it is. There's more stuff out there in the universe than we can see, that's the point. We can see the stars and the galaxies and the things that shine, but for it all to hang together and not fly apart, there needs to be a lot more of it — to make gravity work, you see. But no one can detect it. So there are lots of different research projects trying to find out what it is, and this is one of them.... We think it's some kind of elementary particle. Something quite different from anything discovered so far. But the particles are very hard to detect.

Philip Pullman
Without their tiger gods, the tribe declined into fear and melancholy and begged her to allow them to worship her instead, only to be rejected with contempt; for what good would their worship do her? she asked. It had done nothing for the tigers.

Philip Pullman
I'm perfectly well aware that you've found a doorway somewhere. I guess it's not too far from Summertown, where I dropped Lizzie, or Lyra, this morning. And that through the doorway is another world, one with no grownups in it. Right so far? Well, you see, the man who made that doorway has got a knife. He's hiding in that other world right now, and he's extremely afraid. He has reason to be. If he's where I think he is, he's in an old stone tower with angels carved around the doorway. The Torre degli Angeli.

Philip Pullman