When humans fail you, dogs and roses remain, which has the advantage of simplifying the business of living and stripping it down to a couple of reliable essentials. See the full quotation below.

‘Two things alone remained to him in which he now put any trust: dogs and nature; an elk-hound and a rose bush.  The world, in all its variety, life in all its complexity, had shrunk to that. Dogs and a bush were the whole of it.  So feeling quit of a vast mountain of disillusion, and very naked in consequence, he called his hounds to him and strode through the Park.’

Source: Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography, ed. with an introduction by Rachel Bowlby (Oxford: World’s Classics, 1992), p. 93

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