When a child first catches adults out--when it first walks into
his grave little head that adults do not have divine intelligence,
that their judgements are not always wise, their thinking true,
their sentences just--his world falls into panic desolation. The
gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing
about the fall of the gods; they do not fall a little; they crash...
And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching
kind of growing.
- John Steinbeck