Lewis H. Lapham Quotes

Once you're alienated, you're on your own. That takes you to the world of the existential, where things just kind of float.

I cannot remember my past, my nose, or the colour of my eyes, or what my general opinion of myself is. Only in moments of emergency, at a crossing, at a kerb, the wish to preserve my body springs out and seizes me and stops me , here, before this omnibus. We insist, it seems, on living. Then again, indifference descends.

We live on top of the created world, I think to myself, not in it.

A man said to the universe: 'Sir, I exist!' 'However,' replied the universe. 'The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation.

Nature is monumentally indifferent.

Man, by definition, is born a stranger: coming from nowhere, he is thrust into an alien world which existed before him-a world which didn't need him. And which will survive him.

The thing is, I mean, there’s times when you look at the universe and you think, “What about me?” and you can just hear the universe replying, “Well, what about you?”

I seem fated to pass through the world without colliding with it or moving it — and I'm sure I can't tell you whether the fate's good or evil. I don't die — I don't fall in love. And if other people die or fall in love they always do it when I'm just not there.

The human eye is a wonderful device. With a little effort, it can fail to see even the most glaring injustice.

INDIFFERENT, adj. Imperfectly sensible to distinctions among things.

The world belongs to who doesn't feel. The primary condition to be a practical man is the absence of sensitivity.

The secret of the universe is this: The universe doesn't care. That part of the job is yours.

I guess there was a war going on somewhere in the world that night but it wasn't one that could touch us.

Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.

Where am I? Who am I? How did I come to be here? What is this thing called the world?

Nothing matters. Nothing matters.

I walk around the world like a ghost, and sometimes I question whether I even exist. Whether I've ever existed at all.

And if there is no lining to the world? If a thrush on a branch is not a sign, But just a thrush on the branch? If night and day Make no sense following each other?

When man has come to the Turnstiles of Night, all the creeds in the world seem to him wonderfully alike and colorless.

People don't live or die, people just float.

I have a sort of empty feeling; nothing in the world seems of sufficient importance to be worth the doing.

The man gave a shrug which indicated that, although the world did indeed have many problems, this was one of them that was not his.

Man was an accident on this world or it would have been made better for him!

Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being.