Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later, her war, her taking on a symbol and a reality that outweighed her. Now my insurance rates will go up, she realized as she climbed from her car. In this world you pay for tilting with evil in cold, hard cash.

Philip K Dick, A Scanner Darkly [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher]

Hermetic quote Dick Scanner Darkly taking on a symbol reality outweighed

Consider also:

  1. “often caves are, he says, symbols of ‘all invisible power; because as caves are obscure and dark, so the essence of all these powers is occult,’ and quotes a lost hymn to Apollo to prove that nymphs living in caves fed men ‘from intellectual fountains’; and he contends that fountains and rivers symbolize generation, and that the word nymph ‘is commonly applied to all souls descending into generation,’ and that the two gates of Homer’s cave are the gate of generation and the gate of ascent through death to the gods, the gate of cold and moisture, and the gate of heat and fire.”
  2. “I have sailed down mighty rivers and seen the sun rise and set and the stars come forth whilst I sailed night and day down a rapid stream among mountains.”
  3. I curse the engineer who thought this was a problem in need of a solution.
  4. “He knows, indeed, his Monk has nothing more to give, for there is in Buddhism no priestly office, no intercession between earth and heaven that the Monk can make. But the merit of his charities depends, in this Religion, on the holiness of the recipient; and so the Burman expects from his ‘Great Glory’ only that he shall live according to the Law.”
  5. Beyond the Fields We Know