# Quote — Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Land That Time Forgot

> Miss La Rue was very quiet, though she replied graciously enough to whatever I had to say that required reply. I asked her if she did not feel well.
>
> “Yes,” she said, “but I am depressed by the awfulness of it all. I feel of so little consequence—so small and helpless in the face of all these myriad manifestations of life stripped to the bone of its savagery and brutality. I realize as never before how cheap and valueless a thing is life. Life seems a joke, a cruel, grim joke. You are a laughable incident or a terrifying one as you happen to be less powerful or more powerful than some other form of life which crosses your path; but as a rule you are of no moment whatsoever to anything but yourself. You are a comic little figure, hopping from the cradle to the grave. Yes, that is our trouble—we take ourselves too seriously; but Caprona should be a sure cure for that.” She paused and laughed.
>
> “You have evolved a beautiful philosophy,” I said. “It fills such a longing in the human breast. It is full, it is satisfying, it is ennobling. What wondrous strides toward perfection the human race might have made if the first man had evolved it and it had persisted until now as the creed of humanity.”
>
> “I don’t like irony,” she said; “it indicates a small soul.”
>
> “What other sort of soul, then, would you expect from ‘a comic little figure hopping from the cradle to the grave’?” I inquired. “And what difference does it make, anyway, what you like and what you don’t like? You are here for but an instant, and you mustn’t take yourself too seriously.”

- Author: [Edgar Rice Burroughs](https://www.leafyquotes.com/edgar-rice-burroughs.md)
- Book: [The Land That Time Forgot](https://www.leafyquotes.com/edgar-rice-burroughs/the-land-that-time-forgot.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edgar_Rice_Burroughs#The_Land_That_Time_Forgot_(1918)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/edgar-rice-burroughs/the-land-that-time-forgot/miss-la-rue

## More from this book

> I told them that it was obvious our very existence depended upon our unity of action, that we were to all intent and purpose entering a new world as far from the seat and causes of our own world-war as if millions of miles of space and eons of time separated us from our past lives and habitations.
>
> “There is no reason why we should carry our racial and political hatreds into Caprona,” I insisted. “The Germans among us might kill all the English, or the English might kill the last German, without affecting in the slightest degree either the outcome of even the smallest skirmish upon the western front or the opinion of a single individual in any belligerent or neutral country. I therefore put the issue squarely to you all; shall we bury our animosities and work together with and for one another while we remain upon Caprona, or must we continue thus divided and but half armed, possibly until death has claimed the last of us?

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/edgar-rice-burroughs/the-land-that-time-forgot/i-told-them.md)

> Like all his kind and all other bullies, von Schoenvorts was a coward at heart.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/edgar-rice-burroughs/the-land-that-time-forgot/like-all-his.md)

> I was armed only with a hunting knife, and this I whipped from its scabbard as Kho leaped toward me. He was a mighty beast, mightily muscled, and the urge that has made males fight since the dawn of life on earth filled him with the blood-lust and the thirst to slay; but not one whit less did it fill me with the same primal passions. Two abysmal beasts sprang at each other’s throats that day beneath the shadow of earth’s oldest cliffs—the man of now and the man-thing of the earliest, forgotten then, imbued by the same deathless passion that has come down unchanged through all the epochs, periods and eras of time from the beginning, and which shall continue to the incalculable end—woman, the imperishable Alpha and Omega of life.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/edgar-rice-burroughs/the-land-that-time-forgot/i-was-armed.md)