But how can you walk away from something and still come back to it?

According to my daughters, my most irritating habit is asking for cups of tea.

There are a hundred things she has tried to chase away the things she won't remember and that she can't even let herself think about because that's when the birds scream and the worms crawl and somewhere in her mind it's always raining a slow endless drizzle.

Words save our lives, sometimes.

Children, as I have said, use back ways and hidden paths, while adults take roads and official paths.

Have you thought about what it means to be a god?" asked the man. He had a beard and a baseball cap. "It means you give up your mortal existence to become a meme: something that lives forever in people's minds, like the tune of a nursery rhyme. It means that everyone gets to re-create you in their own minds. You barely have your own identity any more. Instead, you're a thousand aspects of what people need you to be. And everyone wants something different from you. Nothing is fixed, nothing is stable.

All your questions can be answered, if that is what you want. But once you learn your answers, you can never unlearn them.