Life & Wisdom Quote by Margaret Mahy

Growth, in Margaret Mahy’s world, isn’t a shiny montage of self-discovery; it’s the harder business of learning to see other people clearly. The line frames Ellis’s development as inseparable from motion: “adventures” are not ornamental plot events but pressure chambers that force perception to sharpen. Mahy slips in a quiet corrective to the genre’s usual ego-centric arc. Ellis doesn’t mature solely by “finding himself” in some private, interior sense; he matures by recognizing others “for what they are,” a phrase that carries both moral risk and moral urgency.

That wording is doing double duty. On one hand, it suggests empathy as education: to recognize someone’s fears, constraints, and contradictions is to outgrow naive projections. On the other, “for what they are” has a bracing edge, implying disillusionment, the end of romanticized readings of adults, friends, even villains. Mahy is interested in the moment a child protagonist realizes people are not supporting characters in his story but complicated agents with their own motives.

Contextually, this sits squarely in late-20th-century children’s and YA fiction that refuses the sentimental lie that innocence is automatically virtuous. Mahy’s work often treats imagination as powerful but not sufficient; reality pushes back. The intent here is to tie character development to ethical perception: the ability to discern, to revise first impressions, to spot manipulation, to admit kindness can coexist with harm. Ellis changes because the world makes him practice seeing.