Quotations from *Ragtime*, 4 of 5
E.L. Doctorow
1931- American

But there was an intensity of expectation about his eyes that attracted a fair number of women. He was always so serious and unhappy that they were persuaded he loved them. They took him for a poet.
—E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

A while later Younger Brother found himself in the Cooper Union down near the Bowery. The hall was hot, crowded to overflowing. There were lots of foreigners. Men wore their derbies though indoors. It was a great stinking congress garlicked and perfumed in its own perspiration. It had met in support of the Mexican Revolution. He hadn’t known there was a Mexican Revolution.
—E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

I cannot sympathize. You think you are special, losing your lover. It happens every day. Suppose she consented to live with you after all. You’re a bourgeois, you would want to marry her. You would destroy each other inside of a year. You would see her begin to turn old and bored under your very eyes. You would sit across the dinner table from each other in bondage, in terrible bondage to what you thought was love. The both of you. Believe me you are better off this way.
—E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

I’ll tell you something. In this room tonight you saw my present lover but also two of my former lovers. We are all good friends. Friendship is what endures. Shared ideals, respect for the whole character of a human being.
—E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

“I am longing for a kiss”
R.Emujin
Mongolian
translated by Sh.Tsog and Simon Wickham-Smith

I am longing for a kiss.
Oh, my lips are orphaned.
Oh, these days, so old like those in fairy tales!
My feelings are so alive and I can’t bear this loneliness.
Who has left this misery with me alone?
Why love this misery as if it were something precious?
Why accept the way the world is?
How to deal with being so obviously young and
Unleashed, like morning light and evening dusk?
Why care for rumors of not being faithful?
I am longing for a kiss.

Six-Word Novel
Adam

Last man on earth dies smiling.

Quotations from *Ragtime*, 5 of 5
E.L. Doctorow
1931- American

Spring, spring! Like a mad magician flinging silks and colored rags from his trunk the earth produced the yellow and white crocus, then the fox grape, the forsythia flowering on its stalks, the blades of iris, the apple tree blossoms of pink and white and green, the heavy lilac and the daffodil. Grandfather stood in the yard and gave a standing ovation. A breeze came up and blew from the maples a shower of spermatozoic soft-headed green buds. They caught in his sparse gray hair. He shook his head with delight, feeling a wreath had been bestowed. A joyful spasm took hold of him and he stuck his leg out in an old man’s jig, lost his balance, and slid on the heel of his shoe into a sitting position. In this manner he cracked his pelvis and entered a period of declining health from which he would not recover.
—E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

He remembered his attempt to escape from a coffin, the terror when he realized he could not. The coffin had a trick lid but he had not anticipated the weight of the earth. He had clawed at the earth, feeling its monumental weight. He had screamed into its impenetrable silence. He knew what it was to be sealed in the earth but he felt now it was the only place for him.
—E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

During his absence when she had made certain decisions regarding the business, all its mysterious potency was dissipated and she saw it for the dreary unimaginative thing it was. No longer expecting to be beautiful and touched with grace till the end of her days, she was coming to the realization that whereas once, in his courtship, Father might have embodied the infinite possibilities of loving, he had aged and gone dull, made stupid, perhaps, by his travels and his work, so that more and more he only demonstrated his limits, that he had reached them, and that he would never move beyond them.
—E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

“The girl dreams of her lover”
Konstantin Vanshenkin
1925- Russian
translated by Daniel Weissbort

The girl dreams of her lover at night,
And he of her.
He dreams of her full lips,
Her long eyelashes.

The elderly poet dreams
Of splendid lines.
Never did life call forth from him
Poems so fine.

Of sums and calculations the schoolboy dreams,
Of inkwells.
The happy woman dreams her man’s
Unfaithful.

And all these folk have different,
Incongruous dreams.

While, like children, pilots dream
Simply of flying.

Six-Word Novel
Cameron

No, no, no, no, no...yes.