That's The Duty Of The Old, To

The Intentions Of A Tool Are What It Does. A Hammer Intends To Strike, A Vise Intends To Hold Fast, A Lever Intends To Lift. They Are What It Is Made For. But Sometimes A Tool May Have Other Uses That You Don't Know. Sometimes In Doing What You Intend, You Also Do What The Knife Intends, Without Knowing.

Gradually, At Various Points In Our Childhoods, We Discover Different Forms Of Conviction. There's The Rock-hard Certainty Of Personal Experience ("i Put My Finger In The Fire And It Hurt,"), Which Is Probably The Earliest Kind We Learn. Then There's The Logically Convincing, Which We Probably Come To First Through Maths, In The Context Of Pythagoras's Theorem Or Something Similar, And Which, If We First Encounter It At Exactly The Right Moment, Bursts On Our Minds Like Sunrise With The Whole Universe Playing A Great Chord Of C Major.

Teachers Often Make The Mistake Of Thinking They're The Boss Of The Class; They're Not. The Boss Of The Class Is Sitting Down There Somewhere.

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.

Once Upon A Time' Lasts Forever.