Aldiss’s second law of thermo-linguistics states that what is most popular is rarely best and that what is best is rarely most popular. - Brian Aldiss

Sadness is just happiness in reverse. We humans have to put up with it. Just being human is an awful burden to bear.

The ambition of the original Frank had not died; it had grown subtler. It had become a wish to sample everything. The more bodily habitations there were with which to sample, the more tantalizing the idea seemed: for many experiences, belonging only to one brief era, are never repeated, and may be gone before they are perceived and tasted.

Irreconcilables: he should stay here and conform; he should — not stay here (remembering no time when he was not here, Harley could frame the second idea no more clearly than that). Another point of pain was that "here" and "not here" seemed to be not two halves of a homogeneous whole, but two dissonances.