Quotes from E.L. Doctorow

truth is, I just shrug and soldier on. As kind as I am, as well-meaning and helpful as I try to be, I have no feelings finally, for good or ill. In the depths of my being, no matter what happens, I am left cold, impenetrable to remorse, to grief, to happiness, though I can pretend well enough even to the point of fooling myself. I am trying to say I am finally, terribly, unfeeling. My soul resides in a still, deep, beautiful, emotionless, calm cold pond of silence.

It was innocents who died, not those born with the strength of no illusions.

You have to know someone to want to kill him.

Only a fool would call anywhere in this land a place and everywhere else a journey to it.

Homer, maybe you can tell me why I am fatally attracted to women who are no more than mirrors of myself.

Christ, what I wouldn't give to be something other than a human being.

Your father's doing is in you, like his father's was in him, and we can never start new, we take on all the burden: the only thing that grows is trouble, the disasters get bigger, that's all. I

And each morning the sun came up weaker and whiter, like an old man rising from his bed, and each morning's chill was slower giving up the ground.

why must I exclude exclude, if everything is now and mind is matter is not everything valid is not meditation the substance of the mind as well as its practice?

the old Master becoming at some times demonic in his teaching, a destroyer of ego, of humble ordinary lines of thought, an army of right practice, right understanding overwhelming the frail redoubts and trenches of Warren's Western mind.

one day Warren was admitted for his counseling and the Master threw a cup of cold green tea in his face and that was the lesson of the day.

I stopped wondering what she was feeling, what she was thinking. She was happy on the move, alert and at peace, all the inflamed spirit was lifted from her.

The only hope we have is that we can pay off on our failures

You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

Really how life gets on is a secret, you only know your memory, and it makes its own time. The real time leads you along and you never know when it happens, the best that can be is come and gone.

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

How I admired the life of taking pains, of living in defiance of a government that did not like you and did not want you and wanted to destroy you so that you had to build out protections for yourself with money and men, deploying armament, buying alliances, patrolling borders, as in a state of secession, by your will and wit and warrior spirit living smack in the eye of the monster, his very eye. But

Therefore the radical wastes his opportunity if he seriously considers the issues of his trial. If he is found guilty it is the ruling power's decision that he cannot be tolerated. If he is found innocent it is the ruling powers's decision that he need not be feared. The radical must not argue his innocence, for the trial is not of his making; he must argue his ideas.

But if you believe God's divine judgment and you countenance reincarnation, then it may be reasonably assumed that a certain bacterium living in the anus of a particularly ancient hatchetfish at the bottom of the ocean is the recycled and fully sentient soul of Adolf Hitler glimmering miserably through the cloacal muck in which he is periodically bathed and nourished.

Communists have no respect for people, only for positions.

Friendship is what endures. Shared ideals, respect for the whole character of a human being.

If there is a religious agency in our lives, it has to appear in the manner of our times. Not from on high, but a revelation that hides itself in our culture, it will be ground-level, on the street, it'll be coming down the avenue in the traffic, hard to tell apart from anything else.

where reporters were not constrained by the interests of the local chamber of commerce.

Dimmi, Homer, possiamo davvero dirci liberi, se lo siamo solo quando ce lo permettono? (pag. 98)