Life & Wisdom Quote by E. L. Doctorow

Doctorow’s line understands curiosity as a kind of controlled self-harm: we don’t just want comfort, we want the boundary where comfort frays. “The edges of what we are” treats identity less like a core truth and more like a perimeter under pressure, a place you can test with a fingertip. The syntax keeps pushing outward - “out by the edges” - as if the sentence itself can’t sit still in the middle. That restlessness is the point.

His word choices do double duty. “Raw” implies both injury and authenticity; it’s the sensation of skin without its usual protections, the tender proof that something is real. “Nervy” carries bravado and anxiety in the same breath. You’re daring yourself, but you’re also admitting fear. The subtext: growth doesn’t arrive as enlightenment, it arrives as friction. We’re drawn to the threshold where we might be remade or exposed.

Context matters with Doctorow because his novels repeatedly stage that edge-work: characters and nations flirting with the unstable border between myth and history, moral certainty and complicity. Writing about America’s power and its self-deceptions, he returns to moments when the story we tell about ourselves starts to fail - and the failure is productive. The “attraction” here isn’t noble; it’s magnetic, involuntary, a little suspect. We chase extremity, risk, transgression, because the center can feel like sleep. At the edge, you can feel yourself awake.