Quotations from *Ragtime*, 1 of 5
E.L. Doctorow
1931- American

She thought: Yet I know these are the happy years. And ahead of us are only great disasters.
—E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

People who did not respond to his art profoundly distressed Houdini. He had come to realize they were invariably of the upper classes. Always they broke through the pretense of his life and made him feel foolish. Houdini had high inchoate ambition and every development in technology made him restless. On the shabby confines of a stage he could create wonder and awe. Meanwhile men were beginning to take planes into the air, or race automobiles that went sixty miles an hour. A man like Roosevelt had run at the Spanish on San Juan Hill and now sent a fleet of white battleships steaming around the world, battleships as white as his teeth. The wealthy knew what was important. They looked on him as a child or a fool.
—E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

She was so desperately in love that she could no longer see properly, something had happened to her eyes, and she blinked constantly as if to clear them of the blur. She saw everything through a film of salt tears, and her voice became husky because her throat was bathed in the irrepressible and continuous crying which her happiness caused her.
—E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

Father kept himself under control by writing in his journal. This was a system too, the system of language and conceptualization. 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.
—E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

They made love slowly and sinuously, humping each other into such supple states of orgasm that they found very little reason to talk the rest of the time they were together.
—E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

Quotations from *Ragtime*, 2 of 5
E.L. Doctorow
1931- American

Goldman sent off a letter to Evelyn: I am often asked the question How can the masses permit themselves to be exploited by the few. The answer is By being persuaded to identify with them.
—E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

She sat all day in her attic room and watched the diamond windowpanes as they gathered the light, glowed with it and then gave it up.
—E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

In fact he continued the practice not from vanity but because he discovered the mirror as a means of self-duplication. He would gaze at himself until there were two selves facing one another, neither of which could claim to be the real one. The sensation was of being disembodied. He was no longer anything exact as a person. He had the dizzying feeling of separating from himself endlessly. He would entrance himself so deeply in this process that he would be unable to come out of it even though his mind was lucid. He would have to rely on some outside stimulus, a loud noise or a change in the light coming through the window, to capture his attention and make him whole again.
—E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

It was evident to him that the world composed and recomposed itself constantly in an endless process of dissatisfaction.
—E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

He brushed the grass with the tip of his shoe. Exactly six minutes after the car had rolled down the ramp an identical car appeared at the top of the ramp, stood for a moment pointed at the cold early morning sun, then rolled down and crashed into the rear of the first one. Henry Ford had once been an ordinary automobile manufacturer. Now he experienced an ecstasy greater and more intense than that vouchsafed to any American before him, not excepting Thomas Jefferson. He had caused a machine to replicate itself endlessly. His executives and managers and assistants crowded around him to shake his hand. Tears were in their eyes. He allotted sixty seconds on his pocket watch for a display of sentiment. Then he sent everyone back to work.
—E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

Quotations from *Ragtime*, 3 of 5
E.L. Doctorow
1931- American

He had sensed in Ford’s achievement a lust for order as imperial as his own. This was the first sign given to him in some time that he might not be alone on the planet. Pierpont Morgan was that classic American hero, a man born to extreme wealth who by dint of hard work and ruthlessness multiplies the family fortune till it is out of sight. He controlled 741 directorships in 112 corporations. He had once arranged a loan to the United States Government that had saved it from bankruptcy. He had single-handedly stopped the panic of 1907 by arranging for the importation of one hundred million dollars in gold bullion. Moving about in private railroad cars or yachts he crossed all borders and was at home everywhere in the world. He was a monarch of the invisible, transnational kingdom of capital whose sovereignty was everywhere granted. Commanding resources that beggared royal fortunes, he was a revolutionist who left to presidents and kings their territory while he took control of their railroads and shipping lines, banks and trust companies, industrial plants and public utilities. For years he had surrounded himself with parties of friends and acquaintances, always screening them in his mind for the personal characteristics that might indicate less regard for him than they admitted. He was invariably disappointed.
—E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

He heard through his brain the electric winds of an empty universe.
—E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

I have no peers, Morgan said to the bird. It seemed an indisputable truth. Somehow he had catapulted himself beyond the world’s value system. But this very fact lay upon him an awesome responsibility to maintain the illusions of other men.
—E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

He felt if there was something more than he knew, it lay in the past rather than in the present, of whose total bankruptcy of existence he was confident.
—E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

Of course at this time in our history the images of ancient Egypt were stamped on everyone’s mind. This was due to the discoveries being reported out of the desert by British and American archaeologists. After the football players in their padded canvas knee pants and leather helmets, archaeologists were the glamour personages of the universities.
—E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

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

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