Sir Philip Pullman, is an English novelist. He is the author of several best-selling books, including the fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials and the fictionalised biography of Jesus, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. In 2008, The Times named Pullman one of the “50 greatest British writers since 1945”. In a 2004 poll for the BBC, Pullman was named the eleventh most influential person in British culture. He was knighted in the 2019 New Year Honours for “services to literature”.
Northern Lights, the first volume of Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, won the 1995 Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, recognising the year’s outstanding English-language children’s book. For the 70th anniversary of the medal it was named one of the top ten winning works by a panel assembled to compose the ballot for a public election of the all-time favourite. It won the public vote from that shortlist and was thus named the all-time “Carnegie of Carnegies” in June 2007. It was adapted as a film under the book’s US title, The Golden Compass. In 2003, His Dark Materials trilogy was ranked third in the BBC’s The Big Read, a poll of the Top 200 novels voted by the British public. (via Wikipedia)
Listed below are some of the great quotes by this influential personality:
On Life:
All the history of human life has been a struggle between wisdom and stupidity.
On Death:
Human beings can’t see anything without wanting to destroy it. That’s original sin. And I’m going to destroy it. Death is going to die.
We are all subject to the fates. But we must all act as if we are not, or die of despair…death will sweep through all the worlds; it will be the triumph of despair, forever. The universes will all become nothing more than interlocking machines, blind and empty of thought, feeling, life…
(From: The Golden Compass)
On Religion:
I thought physics could be done to the glory of God, till I saw there wasn’t any God at all and that physics was more interesting anyway. The Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake, that’s all.
On Books:
After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.
We don’t need a list of rights and wrongs, tables of dos and don’ts: we need books, time, and silence. Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever.
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 afterlife.
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.
I’m trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief… I’m not in the business of offending people. I find the books upholding certain values that I think are important, such as life is immensely valuable and this world is an extraordinarily beautiful place. We should do what we can to increase the amount of wisdom in the world.
On Love:
I will love you forever; whatever happens. Till I die and after I die, and when I find my way out of the land of the dead, I’ll drift about forever, all my atoms, till I find you again.
She wondered whether there would ever come an hour in her life when she didn’t think of him — didn’t speak to him in her head, didn’t relive every moment they’d been together, didn’t long for his voice and his hands and his love. She had never dreamed of what it would feel like to love someone so much; of all the things that had astonished her in her adventures, that was what astonished her the most. She thought the tenderness it left in her heart was like a bruise that would never go away, but she would cherish it forever.