Better to try and fail than not to try at all

All the times I have suddenly realized that my parents are dead, even now, it still surprises me, to exist in the world while that which made me has ceased to exist

The clarity was startling and Samson wondered whether he was imagining these moments. Not that they hadn't happened at all, but that they had been embellished by details from elsewhere, fragments that survived the obliteration of other memories, vagrant data that gravitated and stuck to what was left to remember. But in the end he rejected this idea. The memories were too perfect: take one detail away and they collapsed into disorder.

Later - when things happened that they could never have imagined - she wrote him a letter that said: When will you learn that there isn't a word for everything

At the most simplistic level physicists tell us that what we see as reality is not actually accurate. A rock looks solid to us but it's full of empty space and atoms moving and we see it as solid because we need to because it helps us survive, right? Survival being our goal. You can extrapolate that to many other things.

...after all, who isn't a survivor from the wreck of childhood?

You can't imagine how hard I am on myself. Nothing pummels me like my own doubts, the feeling of how far I still have to go.