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"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."
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"He got why Eleanor tried so hard to look different. Sort of. It was because she was different - because she wasn't afraid to be."
"When you find yourself wanting to turn your children, or pupils, or even your neighbours, into people exactly like yourself, remember that God probably never meant them to be that. You and they are different organs, intended to do different things."
"Life is too short as we all know it to be. So why dare to spend it trying to live up to other people's worldly expectations of you?"
"I saw myself as an outsider as a teen. I was home-schooled and got my G.E.D. when I was 16 I wasn't interested in high school at all and figured that college might be more entertaining."
"We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people."
"She said my glasses made me look like a butch jock's locker room bitch."
"The world doesn't celebrate your similarity but your difference."
"Stuck in my own trap of writing about a nonsubject, I think I can defend my own self-respect, and also the integrity of a lost girl, by saying two things. First, the trivial doings of Paris Hilton are of no importance to me, or anyone else, and I should not be forced to contemplate them. Second, she should be left alone to lead such a life as has been left to her. If this seems paradoxical, then very well."
"Dare to be different."
"Nothing is more ridiculous than one person telling another how to live."
Explore more quotes by Philip Pullman
"If you can't think of what to write, tough luck; write anyway. If you can think of lots more when you've finished the three pages, don't write it; it'll be that much easier to get going next day."
"Blake said Milton was a true poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it. I am of the Devil's party and know it."
"I shall decide what I do. If you say my work is fighting, or healing, or exploring, or whatever you say, I'll always be thinking about it, and if I end up doing that, I'll feel resentful because it'll feel as I didn't have a choice, and if I don't do it, I'll feel guilty because I should. Whatever I do, I will choose it, no one else."
"If a coin comes down heads, that means that the possibility of its coming down tails has collapsed. Until that moment the two possibilities were equal. But on another world, it does come down tails. And when that happens, the two worlds split apart."
"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."
"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."
"Her upbringing had given her an independence of mind that made her more like a girl of today than one of her own time - which was why she had walked out, and why she was not daunted by the prospect of being alone."
"Fritz had to stop himself from interrupting when Karl spoke about the difficulty of working. Stories are just as hard as clocks to put together, and they can go wrong just as easily--as we shall soon see with Fritz's own story in a page or two. Still, Fritz was an optimist, and Karl was a pessimist, and that makes all the difference in the world."
"One moment several things are possible, the next moment only one happens, and the rest don't exist. Except that other worlds have sprung into being, on which the did happen."
"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."
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