“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.”
Billy Bathgate (1989), Ch. 16
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E.L. Doctorow 25
novelist, editor, professor 1931–2015Related quotes

“… some of the best sex I can barely remember.”

“You remember only what you want to remember. You know only what your heart allows you to know.”
Source: Saving Fish from Drowning

“I can remember when the air was clean and sex was dirty.”

I Will Remember You, written by Sarah McLachlan, Séamus Egan and Dave Merenda
Song lyrics, The Brothers McMullen soundtrack (1995)

Excerpt from the foreword in Girl Boss: Running the Show Like the Big Chicks http://www.gilliananderson.ws/transcripts/99_00/99girlboss.shtml, by Stacy Kravetz (1999)
1990s