The thing was, if you wanted to survive you had to keep going, Natalie had decided. Even when it hurt. Sometimes, she had discovered, you has to walk around the holes in your life, instead of falling into them. ↗
The vast distances that separate the stars are providential. Beings and worlds are quarantined from one another. The quarantine is lifted only for those with sufficient self-knowledge and judgment to have safely traveled from star to star. ↗