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Book: City of God
Quotes of Book: City of God
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  1. E.L. Doctorow _ City of God

    And so each of the passersby on this corner, every scruffy, oversize, undersize, weird, fat, or bony or limping or muttering or foreign-looking, or green-haired punk-strutting, threatening, crazy, angry, inconsolable person I see . . . is a New Yorker, which is to say as native to this diaspora as I am, and part of our great sputtering experiment in a universalist society proposing a world without nations where anyone can be anything and the ID is planetary.
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  2. E.L. Doctorow _ City of God

    And what if neutrinos in their uncountable multitudinous dark-matteredness gravitationally directing the universe . . . are the souls of the dead?
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  3. E.L. Doctorow _ City of God

    19. I wrote in my notebook that even if all the possible scientific questions are answered, our problem is still not touched at all.
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  4. E.L. Doctorow _ City of God

    Novels can do anything in the dark horrors of consciousness. Films do close-ups, car drive-ups, places, chases, and explosions.
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  5. E.L. Doctorow _ City of God

    If there is a religious agency in our lives, it has to appear in the manner of our times. Not from on high, but a revelation that hides itself in our culture, it will be ground-level, on the street, it'll be coming down the avenue in the traffic, hard to tell apart from anything else.
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  6. E.L. Doctorow _ City of God

    9.01 Nausea catalogs the indigestible contents of the stomach that are to be brought up.9.02 Memory that is nauseating catalogs the contents of the mind that can never be brought up.
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  7. E.L. Doctorow _ City of God

    And to top everything he's got this problem he can't let her know how he feels: What-he's shy? Shy! Tell me who in this goddamn world is shy? Young, old, the lame and halt. Clobber you over the head with what they feel. Oh Man I wish just once in my long fucked-up life someone had come up to me who was too shy to tell me what they thought of me...
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  8. E.L. Doctorow _ City of God

    The experience of experience is untransmittable.
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  9. E.L. Doctorow _ City of God

    -Of course movies today no longer require film. They are recorded and held in digital suspension as ones and zeroes. And so at the moment the last remaining piece of the world is lit and shot for a movie, there will be another Big Bang... and the multitudes of ones and zeroes will be strewn through the universe as particles that act like waves... until, shaken by borealic winds or ignited by solar flares or otherwise galvanized by this or that heavenly signal, they compose themselves into brilliant constellations that shine in full color across the night sky of a remote planet... where a reverent, unrecognizable form of life will look up from its rooftops at the faces of Randolph Scott, Gail Russell, George Brent, Linda Darnell... to name just a few of the stars.
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  10. E.L. Doctorow _ City of God

    It has taken time and the blundering wisdom and anarchic greed of our ancestry to construct the modern city of consolidated institutions. It is a great historically amassed communal creation. If you fly above it at night, it is a jeweled wonder of the universe, floating like a giant liner on the sea of darkness. It is smart, accomplished, sophisticated, and breathtakingly beautiful. And it glimmers and sparkles as all things breakable glimmer and sparkle. You wonder how much God had to do with this, how much of the splendor and insolence of the modern city creatively built from the disparate intentions of generations of men comes of the inspiration of God. Because it is the city of the unremarked God, the sometime-thing God, the God of history.
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  11. E.L. Doctorow _ City of God

    So what I realized when I was a child was that if I were traveling as fast as light while holding a mirror before me, I would not see my image in the mirror, because as fast as the image of my face in light moved toward the mirror, why, just as fast would the mirror be moving away... It is a rather frightening idea, in fact, that if I moved at the speed of light, I could get no confirmation of my existence from an objective source of reflected light such as a mirror. I would be like a ghost in the universe, materially unverifiable in the stream of time.
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  12. E.L. Doctorow _ City of God

    And when a song is good, a standard, we recognize it as expressing a truth. Like a formula, it can apply to everyone, not just the singer.
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