City of God Quotes

“But now I speculate re the ants' invisible organ of aggregate thought... if, in a city park of broad reaches, winding paths, roadways, and lakes, you can imagine seeing on a warm and sunny Sunday afternoon the random and unpredictable movement of great numbers of human beings in the same way... if you watch one person, one couple, one family, a child, you can assure yourself of the integrity of the individual will and not be able to divine what the next moment will bring. But when the masses are celebrating a beautiful day in the park in a prescribed circulation of activities, the wider lens of thought reveals nothing errant, nothing inconstant or unnatural to the occasion. And if someone acts in a mutant un-park manner, alarms go off, the unpredictable element, a purse snatcher, a gun wielder, is isolated, surrounded, ejected, carried off as waste. So that while we are individually and privately dyssynchronous, moving in different ways, for different purposes, in different directions, we may at the same time comprise, however blindly, the pulsing communicating cells of an urban over-brain. The intent of this organ is to enjoy an afternoon in the park, as each of us street-grimy urbanites loves to do. In the backs of our minds when we gather for such days, do we know this? How much of our desire to use the park depends on the desires of others to do the same? How much of the idea of a park is in the genetic invitation on nice days to reflect our massive neuromorphology? There is no central control mechanism telling us when and how to use the park. That is up to us. But when we do, our behavior there is reflective, we can see more of who we are because of the open space accorded to us, and it is possible that it takes such open space to realize in simple form the ordinary identity we have as one multicellular culture of thought that is always there, even when, in the comparative blindness of our personal selfhood, we are flowing through the streets at night or riding under them, simultaneously, as synaptic impulses in the metropolitan brain.

Is this a stretch? But think of the contingent human mind, how fast it snaps onto the given subject, how easily it is introduced to an idea, an image that it had not dreamt of thinking of a millisecond before... Think of how the first line of a story yokes the mind into a place, a time, in the time it takes to read it. How you can turn on the radio and suddenly be in the news, and hear it and know it as your own mind's possession in the moment's firing of a neuron. How when you hear a familiar song your mind adopts its attitudinal response to life before the end of the first bar. How the opening credits of a movie provide the parameters of your emotional life for its ensuing two hours... How all experience is instantaneous and instantaneously felt, in the nature of ordinary mind-filling revelation. The permeable mind, contingently disposed for invasion, can be totally overrun and occupied by all the characteristics of the world, by everything that is the case, and by the thoughts and propositions of all other minds considering everything that is the case... as instantly and involuntarily as the eye fills with the objects that pass into its line of vision.”
― E.L. Doctorow, City of God

“And so the ordinary unendurable torments we all experienced were indeed exceptional in the way they were absorbed in each heart.”
― E.L. Doctorow, City of God

“You want God? Don't look at Scripture, look everywhere, at the planets, the constellations, the universe. Look at a bug, a flea. Look at the manifold wonders of creation, including the Nazis. That's the kind of God you're dealing with.”
― E.L. Doctorow, City of God

“I take the position that true faith is not a supersessional knowledge. It cannot discard the intellect.”
― E.L. Doctorow, City of God

“Orthodox devotions that do not let in the light of modern knowledge are no more than a form of ancestor worship.”
― E.L. Doctorow, City of God

“But I can stop on any corner at the intersection of two busy streets, and before me are thousands of lives headed in all four directions, uptown downtown east and west, on foot, on bikes, on in-line skates, in buses, strollers, cars, trucks, with the subway rumble underneath my feet... and how can I not know I am momentarily part of the most spectacular phenomenon in the unnatural world? ...The city may begin from a marketplace, a trading post, the confluence of waters, but it secretly depends on the human need to walk among strangers.”
― 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.”
― 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.”
― 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.”
― 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?”
― 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.”
― E.L. Doctorow, City of God

“...if I moved at the speed of light, I could get no confirmation of my existence from an objective source of reflected lightsuch as a mirror. I would be like a ghost in the universe, materially unverifiable in the stream of time.”
― E.L. DoctorowDoctorow, 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...”
― E.L. Doctorow, City of God

“I feel such stillness, the stillness of listening to a story whose end I know. I am looking at times when people had a story to enact and the streets they walked upon were narrative passages. What kind of word is infrastructure? It is a word that proves we have lost our city. Our streets are for transit. Our stories are disassembled, the skyscrapers crowding us scoff at the idea of a credible culture.”
― E.L. Doctorow, City of God

“A story on the page is like a printed circuit for our lives to flow through, A story told invokes our dim capacity to be alive in bodies not our own. You would want the whole planet in voice and the totality of intimate human narrations composing a hymn to enlightenment if that were possible. In”
― E.L. Doctorow, City of God: A Novel

“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.”
― 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.”
― 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.

Not that you shouldn't watch your pocketbook, lady.

”
― 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.”
― 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.”
― E.L. Doctorow, City of God

“The experience of experience is untransmittable.”
― E.L. Doctorow, City of God