‘Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time—’ That’s the sort of thing she would have written before the ri… - Frederik Pohl

Anyway, that's what life is, just one learning experience after another, and when you're through with all the learning experiences you graduate and what you get for a diploma is, you die.

There’s an editor for you.
They’re all the same. At first they’re all honey and sweet talk, with those long alcoholic lunches and blue-sky conversation about million-copy printings while they wheedle you into signing the contract. Then they turn nasty. They want the actual book delivered. When they don’t get it, or when the censors say they can’t print it, then there isn’t any more sweet talk and all the conversation is about how the aediles will escort you to debtors’ prison.

Scientists are an agnostic lot, of course—well, most educated people are, aren’t they?