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*, 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