“Lyra learns to her great cost that fantasy isn’t enough. She has been lying all her life, telling stories to people, making up fantasies, and suddenly she comes to a point where that’s not enough. All she can do is tell the truth. She tells the truth about her childhood, about the experiences she had in Oxford, and that is what saves her. True experience, not fantasy - reality, not lies - is what saves us in the end.”

English writer, best known for His Dark Materials

Sir Philip Nicholas Outram Pullman is an English writer, best known for the fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials. He is a contemporary author whose work has reached a wide readership, with 119 quotes on this site. His Dark Materials began with Northern Lights in 1995, which won the Carnegie Medal and later the "Carnegie of Carnegies". The third volume, The Amber Spyglass, won the Whitbread Award. He later began the companion trilogy The Book of Dust in 2017, and its final novel, The Rose Field, was published in October 2025.