The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: E.L. Doctorow

Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader – not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.

Writing, Feeling

I started on computers with ‘Billy Bathgate,’ a little orange screen with black letters. I thought it was really cool, but it actually slowed me up for a while because it’s so easy to revise, I tended to stay on the same page. I’ve learned to discipline myself.

Myself, Computers, Me

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.

existence, human

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.

bible, culture, spirituality

The images of things are not the things in themselves.

consciousness, images

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.

death, immigrant, salvation, self, self-awareness

It is the law of wealth that such people only profit from the money that is taken from them.

The difference between Socrates and Jesus is that no one had ever been put to death in Socrates’ name. And that is because Socrates’ ideas were never made law. Law, in whatever name, protects privilege.

jesus, separation-of-church-and-state, socialism, socrates

Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader–not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.” –

author-quotes, writers-quotes

Emily supposed the modern world was fortunate in the progress of science. But she could not help but feel at this moment the impropriety of male invasiveness. She knew he was working to save this poor woman, but in her mind, too, was a sense of Wrede’s science as adding to the abuse committed by his fellow soldiers. He said not a word. It was as if the girl were no more than the surgical challenge she offered.

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

contentment, happiness

The three most important documents a free society gives are a birth certificate, a passport, and a library card.