E.L. Doctorow’s “Ragtime” Quotes (15 Quotes)

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.

It is the law of wealth that such people only profit from the money that is taken from them.

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.

It was evident to him that the world composed and recomposed itself constantly in an endless process of dissatisfaction.

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.

Poor Father, I see his final exploration. He arrives at the new place, his hair risen in astonishment, his mouth and eyes dumb. His toe scuffs a soft storm of sand, he kneels and his arms spread in pantomimic celebration, the immigrant, as in every moment of his life, arriving eternally on the shore of his Self.

So that individuation may be compared to a pyramid in that it is only achieved by the placement of the top stone… The Jews, Ford said. They ain't like anyone else I know. There goes you theory up shits creek. He smiled.

The businessmen wondered if they could create such individuals not from the accidents of news events but from the deliberate manufactures of their own medium.

To Morgan, the disfigurement of his monstrous nose was the touch of God upon him, the assurance of mortality. It was the steadiest assurance he had.

We are all good friends. Friendship is what endures. Shared ideals, respect for the whole character of a human being.

You're nothing more than a clever prostitute. You accepted the conditions in which you found yourself and you triumphed.

And though the newspapers called the shooting the Crime of the Century, Goldman knew it was only 1906 and there were ninety-four years to go.

And why? Is our genius only in our wombs? Can we not write books and create learned scholarship and perform music and provide philosophical models for the betterment of mankind?

Because like all whores you value propriety. You are creature of capitalism, the ethics of which are so totally corrupt and hypocritical that your beauty is no more than the beauty of gold, which is to say false and cold and useless.

Father looked at her and she was beautiful in the way she had been as a girl. He did not realize the pleasure he felt in having made her cry.