She strengthened her will by saying “It is the Way. - Brian Aldiss

In the extraordinary ancestral compost heap of your unconscious mind, I have burrowed too long.

"So what's this "sad" business mean, anyway? I mean, how often do you feel like doing it?'
'Sad? Oh, sadness is just happiness in reverse. We humans have to put up with it. Just being human is an awful burden to bear.'
'You keep on doing it? Is that why you feel compelled to collect all these old secondhand sunsets?"

Perhaps the first fire, the first tool, the first wheel, the first carving in a limestone cave, had each possessed a symbolic rather than a practical value, had each been pressed to serve distortion rather than reality. It was a sort of madness that had driven man from his humble sites on the edges of the woods into towns and cities, into arts and wars, into religious crusades, into martyrdom and prostitution, into dyspepsia and fasting, into love and hatred, into this present cul-de-sac; it had all come about in pursuit of symbols. In the beginning was the symbol, and darkness was over the face of the Earth.