#lewis lapham

[W]hen I enter a bookstore I am besieged by the same sense of imminent discovery that follows me through seaports and capital cities. This restlessness never troubles me in libraries, probably because libraries are to me like museums.

Ancient Greeks had a word for it: Pleonexia, which is a disease that imagines there's nothing that money can't buy. Pleonexia is a desire for more, more of everything—more dancing girls, more cruise missiles, more floors on the building on the 57th Street, more circulation, more profit, in other words, more for the rich, less for everybody else, good luck and good bye.

Make the mistake of thinking that you can decide to become a writer and you've already lost the bet. Writers happen by accident, not by design. They have as little choice in the matter as lemmings toppling over cliffs.

Fear itself these days is America's top-selling consumer product, available 24-7 as a mobile app with colour-coded pop-ups in all shades of the paranoid rainbow."

“Read to live,” says Flaubert somewhere in his letters, and where else does one live if not in a house of straw, signs, and symbols made from the shaping and reshaping of a once-upon-a-time. History is a record of event (kingdoms lost and battles won, cities built and churches burned), but it is also the compost heap of human civilization; the finding of the present in the past, the past in the present, is the stuff of which our lives, our liberties, and pursuits of happiness are made. I don’t go in search of the lost gold mines of imperishable truth; I look instead for where I might learn what it is to be a human being.