Stories don’t teach us to be good; it isn’t as simple as that. They show us what it feels like to be good, or to be bad. They show us people like ourselves doing right things and wrong things, acting bravely or acting meanly, being cruel or being kind, and they leave it up to our own powers of empathy and imagination to make the connection with our own lives. Sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t. It isn’t like putting a coin in a machine and getting a chocolate bar; we’re not mechanical, we don’t respond every time in the same way… The moral teaching comes gently, and quietly, and little by little, and weighs nothing at all. We hardly know it’s happening. But in this silent and discreet way, with every book we read and love, with every story that makes its way into our heart, we gradually acquire models of behavior and friends we admire and patterns of decency and kindness to follow. . Philip Pullman
Sometimes two people have to fall apart, to realize how much they need to fall back together.
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Colleen Hoover
What are we doing to each other? Because I know that I am doing to him exactly what he is doing to me. We are sometimes so happy, and never in our lives have we known more unhappiness.
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Graham Greene
The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by...
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Oscar Wilde
The truth is, everyone likes to look down on someone. If your favorites are all avant-garde writers who throw in Sanskrit and German, you can look down on everyone. If your favorites are all Oprah Book Club books, you can at least look down on...
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Brent Weeks
Personal experience is the basis of all real literature.
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George Henry Lewis
More Quotes By Philip Pullman
I'll be looking for you, Will, every moment, every single moment. And when we do find each other again, we'll cling together so tight that nothing and no one'll ever tear us apart. Every atom of me and every atom of you.. We'll live in...
I told him I was going to betray you, and betray Lyra, and he believed me because I was corrupt and full of wickedness; he looked so deep I felt sure he'd see the truth. But I lied too well. I was lying with every...
You cannot change what you are, only what you do.
If you want something you can have it, but only if you want everything that goes with it, including all the hard work and the despair, and only if you're willing to risk failure.
That’s the duty of the old, to be anxious on behalf of the young. And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old.
