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"Ruta Skadi was four hundred and sixteen years old, with all the pride and knowledge of an adult witch queen. She was wiser by far than any short-lived human, but she had not the slightest idea of how like a child she seemed beside these ancient beings. Nor did she know how far their awareness spread out beyond her like filamentary tentacles to the remotest corners of universes she had never dreamed of; nor that she saw them as human-formed only because her eyes expected to. If she were to perceive their true form, they would seem more like architecture than organism, like huge structures composed of intelligence and feeling.But they expected nothing else: she was very young."
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Exlpore more Wisdom quotes

"True wisdom often comes from the experience of failure-not from success."

"Three kinds of people achieve illumination: those who learn, those who teach, and those who do both continuously."

"Some persons can't accept the truth, due to their inability to let go of their own perceptions."

"When a youth was giving himself airs in the Theatre and saying, 'I am wise, for I have conversed with many wise men,' Epictetus replied, 'I too have conversed with many rich men, yet I am not rich!'."

"A smart person knows how to talk. A wise person knows when to be silent."

"Integrity is doing the right thing when nobody's watching, and doing as you say you would do."

"Rumi himself once said that counterfeit gold is only to be found because there is such a thing as real gold to be copied."

"Answers were always important, but they were seldom easy."
Explore more quotes by Philip Pullman

"I write almost always in the third person, and I don't think the narrator is male or female anyway. They're both, and young and old, and wise and silly, and sceptical and credulous, and innocent and experienced, all at once. Narrators are not even human - they're sprites."

"But suppose your dA mon settles in a shape you don't like?Well, then, you're discontented, en't you? There's plenty of folk as'd like to have a lion as a dA mon and they end up with a poodle. And till they learn to be satisfied with what they are, they're going to be fretful about it. Waste of feeling, that is.But it didn't seem to Lyra that she would ever grow up."

"Being a practiced liar doesn't mean you have a powerful imagination. Many good liars have no imagination at all, it's that which gives their lies such wide-eyed conviction."

"I think it's perfectly possible to explain how the universe came about without bringing God into it, but I don't know everything, and there may well be a God somewhere, hiding away. Actually, if he is keeping out of sight, it's because he's ashamed of his followers and all the cruelty and ignorance they're responsible for promoting in his name. If I were him, I'd want nothing to do with them."

"Who are you?' the woman said at last.'Lyra Silver-''No, where d'you come from? What are you? How do you know things like this?' Wearily 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."

"What I do say is that I can write verse, and that the writing of verse in strict form is the best possible training for writing good prose."
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