"Grow up? Get herself straightened out? Her mind reeled from the verbal battering. No matter what she did, her father would tell her she was wrong. Worthless. Undeserving."

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You had to form for yourself a lucid language for the world, to overcome the battering of experience, to replace everyday life's pain and harshness and wretched dreariness with - no not with certainty but with an ignorance you could live with. Deep ignorance, but still a kind that knew its limits. The limits were crucial.

— Gregory Benford