E. L. Doctorow - Quodid

About

Picture of E. L. Doctorow

Edgar Lawrence Doctorow (January 6, 1931 – July 21, 2015) was an American novelist, editor, and professor, known for his historical fiction. He wrote three volumes of short fiction, a stage drama, and twelve novels, including the award-winning Ragtime (1975), Billy Bathgate (1989), and The March (2005). Like many of his other works, these placed fictional characters in recognizable historical contexts with known historical figures, and used various narrative styles. His stories were recognized for their originality and versatility, and Doctorow was praised for his audacity and imagination.

Quotes from E. L. Doctorow

When ideas go unexamined and unchallenged for a long enough time, certain things happen. They become mythological, and they become very, very powerful. They create conformity. They intimidate.

—E. L. Doctorow

power ideas myth conformity

You can't remember sex. You can remember the fact of it, and recall the setting, and even the details, but the sex of the sex cannot be remembered, the substantive truth of it; it is by nature self-erasing; you can remember its anatomy and be left with a judgment as to the degree of your liking of it, but whatever it is as a splurge of being, as a loss, as a charge of the conviction of love stopping your heart like your execution, there is no memory of it in the brain, only the deduction that it happened and that time passed, leaving you with a silhouette that you want to fill in again.

—E. L. Doctorow

truth memory sex brain