Quotes from E.L. Doctorow

The poem is a cry of the unborn heart. Yes, because the poem perfectly embodies the world, there is no world without poem.

I keep thinking someone will come by sometime who will want to use the wood.

We have had the bomb on our minds since 1945. It was first our weaponry, and then diplomacy, and now it's our economy. How can we suppose that something so monstrously powerful could not, after 40 years, compose our identity?

When crime was working as it was supposed to it was very dull. Very lucrative and very dull.

Novels can do anything in the dark horrors of consciousness. Films do close-ups, car drive-ups, places, chases, and explosions.

And why is Grant so solemn today upon our great achievement, except he knows this unmeaning inhuman planet will need our warring imprint to give it value, and that our civil war, the devastating manufacture of the bones of our sons, is but a war after a war, a war before a war.

Yet I know these are the happy years. And ahead of us are only great disasters.

Mi único trauma es la vida.

Es una especie de cárcel, la mente del cerebro. Tenemos estos misteriosos cerebros de mil trescientos gramos, y nos encarcelan.

and his religion no longer had any authority … other than as an organizer of his daily life and conduct as a filing system for his perceptions. From The Waterworks.

If she loved she acted in love, if she was betrayed she was destroyed. These were the shining and dangerous facts of the life of an innocent.

Even love aghast was love, and God could not destroy that.

But the institutional mind has only one mental operation: It abhors truth.

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

The businessmen wondered if they could create such individuals not from the accidents of news events but from the deliberate manufactures of their own medium.

But the boy's eyes saw only the tracks made by the skaters, traces quickly erased of moments past, journeys taken.

There is great human shame when people die before they are ready. It's as if their living didn't matter at all. I

Truth is, if the drought don't get you and the blizzards don't get you, that's when some devil with liquor in his soul and a gun in his claw will ride you down and clean you out.

The only hope we have is that we

can pay off on our failures, and Molly's grin had burned the hope right out of me.

9.01 Nausea catalogs the indigestible contents of the stomach that are to be brought up. 9.02 Memory that is nauseating catalogs the contents of the mind that can never be brought up.

A story on the page is like a printed circuit for our lives to flow through, A story told invokes our dim capacity to be alive in bodies not our own. You would want the whole planet in voice and the totality of intimate human narrations composing a hymn to enlightenment if that were possible. In

19. I wrote in my notebook that even if all the possible scientific questions are answered, our problem is still not touched at all.

And then there was that feeling one gets in a ride to a cemetery trailing a body in a coffin-an impatience with the dead, a longing to be back home where one could get on with the illusion that not death but daily life is the permanent condition.