Quotes by EL Doctorow

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

I am often asked the question How can the masses permit themselves to be exploited by the few. The answer is By being persuaded to identify with them.

E.L. Doctorow

Because like all whores you value propriety. You are creature of capitalism, the ethics of which are so totally corrupt and hypocritical that your beauty is no more than the beauty of gold, which is to say false and cold and useless.

E.L. Doctorow

Thus with continued concentration and the expenditure of enormous amounts of energy he tried to keep himself from slipping into the vast distances of his unhappiness. It was all around him. It was a darkness as impudently close as his brow. It choked...

E.L. Doctorow

It proposed that human beings, by the act of making witness, warranted times and places for their existence other than the time and place they were living through.

E.L. Doctorow

It is the law of wealth that such people only profit from the money that is taken from them.

E.L. Doctorow

Poor Father, I see his final exploration. He arrives at the new place, his hair risen in astonishment, his mouth and eyes dumb. His toe scuffs a soft storm of sand, he kneels and his arms spread in pantomimic celebration, the immigrant, as in every m...

E.L. Doctorow

Somehow he had catapulted himself beyond the world's value system. But this very fact lay upon him an awesome responsibility to maintain the illusions of other men.

E.L. Doctorow

Writing is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

E.L. Doctorow

Emily supposed the modern world was fortunate in the progress of science. But she could not help but feel at this moment the impropriety of male invasiveness. She knew he was working to save this poor woman, but in her mind, too, was a sense of Wrede...

E.L. Doctorow

I watched bulls bred to cows, watched mares foal, I saw life come from the egg and the multiplicative wonders of mudholes and ponds, the jell and slime of life shimmering in gravid expectation. Everywhere I looked, life sprang from something not life...

E.L. Doctorow

I knew he was unreliable, but he was fun to be with. He was a child’s ideal companion, full of surprises and happy animal energy. He enjoyed food and drink. He liked to try new things. He brought home coconuts, papayas, mangoes, and urged them on o...

E.L. Doctorow

one day you stepped in snow, the next in mud, water soaked in your boots and froze them at night, it was the next worst thing to pure blizzardry, it was weather that wouldn't let you settle.

E.L. Doctorow

The images of things are not the things in themselves.

E.L. Doctorow

There is music in words, and it can be heard you know, by thinking.

E.L. Doctorow

Satire's nature is to be one-sided, contemptuous of ambiguity, and so unfairly selective as to find in the purity of ridicule an inarguable moral truth.

E.L. Doctorow

Happiness consists of living in the dailyness of life and not knowing how happy you are.

E.L. Doctorow

Someone dying asks if there is life after death. Yes, comes the answer, only not yours.

E.L. Doctorow

The difference between Socrates and Jesus is that no one had ever been put to death in Socrates' name. And that is because Socrates' ideas were never made law. Law, in whatever name, protects privilege.

E.L. Doctorow

The three most important documents a free society gives are a birth certificate, a passport, and a library card.

EL Doctorow