People think it’s a failure to live alone. But it isn’t. The failure is to live with someone because you can’t face anything else. - M. John Harrison

Then he heard a voice say: “It was amazing to them to discover they had always been in the garden without understanding it,” and knew for certain that the inside and the outside of everything are always a single, continuous medium. In that moment he believed he could go anywhere. With a shout of elation he attempted to fall forward in all possible directions at once; only to find to his dismay that in the very exercise of this privilege he had selected one of them.

Generally, it was impossible to understand the motives of aliens.

They were arrant newcomers, driven by the nouveau enthusiasms of a cowboy economy. They had no idea what they had come for, or how to get it: they only knew they would. They had no idea how to comport themselves. They sensed there was money to be made. They dived right in. They started wars. They stunned into passivity five of the alien races they found in possession of the galaxy and fought the sixth—which they called “the Nastic” out of a mistranslation of the Nastic’s word for “space”—to a wary truce. After that they fought one another.