E. L. Doctorow - Time Quotes

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Time seems to me a drift, a shifting of sand. And my mind is shifting with it. I am wearing away.

E. L. Doctorow

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

In this country we tend to be naive about history. We think it's Newton's perfect mechanical universe, out there predictably for everyone to see and set their watches by. But it's more like curved space, and infinitely compressible and expandable time. It's constant subatomic chaos.

E. L. Doctorow

We make a mistake to condescend to the past as if it were preparatory to our own time.

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