E. L. Doctorow - People Quotes

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In the twentieth century one of the most personal relationships to have developed is that of the person and the state... It's become a fact of life that governments have become very intimate with people, most always to their detriment.

E. L. Doctorow
History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.

E. L. Doctorow
Planning to write is not writing. Outlining... researching... talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.

E. L. Doctorow
Murders are exciting and lift people into a heart-beating awe as religion is supposed to do, after seeing one in the street young couples will go back to bed and make love, people will cross themselves and thank God for the gift of their stuporous lives, old folks will talk to each other over cups of hot water with lemon because murders are enlivened sermons to be analyzed and considered and relished, they speak to the timid of the dangers of rebellion, murders are perceived as momentary descents of God and so provide joy and hope and righteous satisfaction to parishioners, who will talk about them for years afterward to anyone who will listen.

E. L. Doctorow
It is the immigrant hordes who keep this country alive, the waves of them arriving year after year.... Who believes in America more than the people who run down the gangplank and kiss the ground?

E. L. Doctorow
Most people are quiet in the world, and live in it tentatively, as if it were not their own.

E. L. Doctorow
The voice of the Constitution is the inescapably solemn self-consciousness of the people giving the law unto themselves.

E. L. Doctorow
And so do people pass out of one's life and all you can remember of them is their humanity, a poor fitful thing of no dominion, like your own.

E. L. Doctorow
The philosophical conservative is someone willing to pay the price of other people s suffering for his principles.

E. L. Doctorow