The three most important documents a free society gives are a birth certificate, a passport, and a library card.
E. L. DoctorowAnd 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. DoctorowThe historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.
E. L. DoctorowThere are moments when I cannot bear this unremitting consciousness. It knows only itself. Awake, I am in a continuum with my dreams. I feel my typewriters, my table, my chair to have that assurance of a solid world, where things take up space, where is not the endless emptiness of insubstantial thought that leads to nowhere but itself. My memories pale as I prevail upon them again and again. They become more and more ghostly. I fear nothing so much as losing them altogether and having only my blank endless mind to live in.
E. L. Doctorow