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7fe5a02
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Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
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E.L. Doctorow |
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7586786
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There is music in words, and it can be heard you know, by thinking.
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power-of-words
reflection
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E.L. Doctorow |
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c61c5ae
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I am often asked the question How can the masses permit themselves to be exploited by the few. The answer is By being persuaded to identify with them.
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E.L. Doctorow |
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bf6594a
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It was evident to him that the world composed and recomposed itself constantly in an endless process of dissatisfaction.
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E.L. Doctorow |
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f6526e4
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We are all good friends. Friendship is what endures. Shared ideals, respect for the whole character of a human being.
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E.L. Doctorow |
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54acb6b
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Because like all whores you value propriety. You are creature of capitalism, the ethics of which are so totally corrupt and hypocritical that your beauty is no more than the beauty of gold, which is to say false and cold and useless.
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E.L. Doctorow |
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368bd24
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Writing is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
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writing
writer-s-block
writers-on-writing
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E.L. Doctorow |
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d44af51
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hr shhry srnjm bh pyn myrsd w jdhy thy aGz myshwd khh pymwdn an ymn myTlbd
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E.L. Doctorow |
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2c7ae42
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I asked this question: How can I think about my brain when it's my brain doing the thinking? So is this brain pretending to be me thinking about it?
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E.L. Doctorow |
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978b89e
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I watched bulls bred to cows, watched mares foal, I saw life come from the egg and the multiplicative wonders of mudholes and ponds, the jell and slime of life shimmering in gravid expectation. Everywhere I looked, life sprang from something not life, insects unfolded from sacs on the surface of still waters and were instantly on prowl for their dinner, everything that came into being knew at once what to do and did it, unastonished that it..
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life
vitality
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E.L. Doctorow |
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8e3e887
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I knew he was unreliable, but he was fun to be with. He was a child's ideal companion, full of surprises and happy animal energy. He enjoyed food and drink. He liked to try new things. He brought home coconuts, papayas, mangoes, and urged them on our reluctant conservative selves. On Sundays he liked to discover new places, take us on endless bus or trolley rides to some new park or beach he knew about. He always counseled daring, in whatev..
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father
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E.L. Doctorow |
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36975a3
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His life was absurd. He went all over the world accepting all kinds of bondage and escaping. He was roped to a chair. He escaped. He was chained to a ladder. He escaped. He was handcuffed, his legs were put in irons, he was tied up in a strait jacket and put in a locked cabinet. He escaped. He escaped from bank vaults, nailed-up barrels, sewn mailbags; he escaped from a zinc-lined Knabe piano case, a giant football, a galvanized iron boiler..
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E.L. Doctorow |
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7b41e15
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You're nothing more than a clever prostitute. You accepted the conditions in which you found yourself and you triumphed.
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E.L. Doctorow |
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a62ea65
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I remember holding her in my arms and absolving God of meaninglessness.
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E.L. Doctorow |
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8d1b0cf
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And so the ordinary unendurable torments we all experienced were indeed exceptional in the way they were absorbed in each heart.
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E.L. Doctorow |
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2c78860
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And why? Is our genius only in our wombs? Can we not write books and create learned scholarship and perform music and provide philosophical models for the betterment of mankind?
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E.L. Doctorow |
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d45c578
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Father looked at her and she was beautiful in the way she had been as a girl. He did not realize the pleasure he felt in having made her cry.
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E.L. Doctorow |
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d9d6dea
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You want God? Don't look at Scripture, look everywhere, at the planets, the constellations, the universe. Look at a bug, a flea. Look at the manifold wonders of creation, including the Nazis. That's the kind of God you're dealing with.
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E.L. Doctorow |
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893d684
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The story was clearly over, as in juggling when the ball you throw up finds the moment to come down, hesitates as if it might not, and then drops at the same speed of that celestial light. And life is no longer good but just what you happen to be holding.
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life
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E.L. Doctorow |
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97a9a2d
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The Shadow had no imagination. He neither looked at naked women nor thought of ridding the world of dictators like Hitler or Mussolini.
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E.L. Doctorow |
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8d9f301
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But now I speculate re the ants' invisible organ of aggregate thought... if, in a city park of broad reaches, winding paths, roadways, and lakes, you can imagine seeing on a warm and sunny Sunday afternoon the random and unpredictable movement of great numbers of human beings in the same way... if you watch one person, one couple, one family, a child, you can assure yourself of the integrity of the individual will and not be able to divine ..
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E.L. Doctorow |
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680f78b
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The ultimate technological achievement will be escaping from the mess we've made. There will be none after that because we will reproduce everything that we did on earth, we'll go through the whole sequence all over again somewhere else, and people will read my paper as prophecy, and know that having gotten off one planet, they will be able to destroy another with confidence.
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E.L. Doctorow |
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51106db
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Grandmamma had been the last connection to our past. I had understood her as some referent moral authority to whom we paid no heed, but by whose judgments we measured our waywardness.
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E.L. Doctorow |
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f68f9a7
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Where most people live, most of us, imagining it to be the real sunlit world when it is only a cave lit by the flickering fires of illusion.
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E.L. Doctorow |
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678f3ca
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Thus with continued concentration and the expenditure of enormous amounts of energy he tried to keep himself from slipping into the vast distances of his unhappiness. It was all around him. It was a darkness as impudently close as his brow. It choked him by its closeness. And what was most terrifying was its treachery. He would wake up in the morning and see the sun coming in the window, and sit up in his bed and think it was gone, and then..
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sadness
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E.L. Doctorow |
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6a18a06
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I take the position that true faith is not a supersessional knowledge. It cannot discard the intellect.
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E.L. Doctorow |
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f382448
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I'm Homer, the blind brother.
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E.L. Doctorow |
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24a5782
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Jacqueline, for how many days have I been without food. There was a crash, the whole house shook. Where is Langley? Where is my brother?
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E.L. Doctorow |
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a03382b
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But I can stop on any corner at the intersection of two busy streets, and before me are thousands of lives headed in all four directions, uptown downtown east and west, on foot, on bikes, on in-line skates, in buses, strollers, cars, trucks, with the subway rumble underneath my feet... and how can I not know I am momentarily part of the most spectacular phenomenon in the unnatural world? ...The city may begin from a marketplace, a trading p..
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E.L. Doctorow |
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2a880ce
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Perhaps we all reappear, perhaps all our lives are impositions one on another.
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E.L. Doctorow |
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0a291a7
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To Morgan, the disfigurement of his monstrous nose was the touch of God upon him, the assurance of mortality. It was the steadiest assurance he had.
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E.L. Doctorow |
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f44e092
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Poor Father, I see his final exploration. He arrives at the new place, his hair risen in astonishment, his mouth and eyes dumb. His toe scuffs a soft storm of sand, he kneels and his arms spread in pantomimic celebration, the immigrant, as in every moment of his life, arriving eternally on the shore of his Self.
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self-awareness
salvation
immigrant
self
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E.L. Doctorow |
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9d70d37
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Orthodox devotions that do not let in the light of modern knowledge are no more than a form of ancestor worship.
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E.L. Doctorow |
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64073a1
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Many historians have noted an interesting phenomenon in American life in the years immediately after a war. In the councils of government fierce partisanship replaces the necessary political coalitions of wartime. IN the great arena of social relations -- business, labour, the community -- violence rises, fear and recrimination dominate public discussion, passion prevails over reason. Many historians have noted this phenomenon. It is attrib..
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E.L. Doctorow |
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b6279d0
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The consumption of food was a sacrament of success. A man who carried a great stomach before him was thought to be in his prime. Women went into hospitals to die of burst bladders, collapsed lungs, overtaxed hearts and meningitis of the spine. There was a heavy traffic to the spas and sulphur springs, where the purgative was valued as an inducement to the appetite. America was a great farting country. All this began to change when Taft move..
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E.L. Doctorow |
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9e73424
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She's some kind of Socialist-anarchist-anarcho-syndicalist-Communist. Unless you're one of them you can't tell exactly what any of them are.
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E.L. Doctorow |
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357dc00
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On the labour front in 1919 there was an unprecedented number of strikes involving many millions of workers. One of the lager strikes was mounted by the AF of L against the United States Steel Corporation. At that time workers in the steel industry put in an average sixty-eight-hour week for bare subsistence wages. The strike spread to other plants, resulting in considerable violence -- the death of eighteen striking workers, the calling ou..
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E.L. Doctorow |
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bae92e4
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A stydy today of the products of the animated cartoon industry of the twenties, thirties and forties would yield the following theology: 1. People are animals. 2. The body is mortal and subject to incredible pain. 3. Life is antagonistic to the living. 4. The flesh can be sawed, crushed, frozen, stretched, burned, bombed, and plucked for music. 5. The dumb are abused by the smart and the smart are destroyed by their own cunning. 6. The smal..
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E.L. Doctorow |
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b03bcaf
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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.
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E.L. Doctorow |
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f755865
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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.
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human
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E.L. Doctorow |
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96d7a6e
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And when a song is good, a standard, we recognize it as expressing a truth. Like a formula, it can apply to everyone, not just the singer.
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E.L. Doctorow |
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502de05
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So what I realized when I was a child was that if I were traveling as fast as light while holding a mirror before me, I would not see my image in the mirror, because as fast as the image of my face in light moved toward the mirror, why, just as fast would the mirror be moving away... It is a rather frightening idea, in fact, that if I moved at the speed of light, I could get no confirmation of my existence from an objective source of reflec..
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E.L. Doctorow |
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8dc872c
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Somehow he had catapulted himself beyond the world's value system. But this very fact lay upon him an awesome responsibility to maintain the illusions of other men.
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responsibility-to-protect
society
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E.L. Doctorow |
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37f03bb
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The bad news is that if we do in fact get off the earth we will contaminate the rest of the universe with our moral insufficiency.
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E.L. Doctorow |