“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.” CultureSpiritualityBible Book:City of God Source: City of God
“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.” SelfDeathSelf AwarenessSalvationImmigrant Book:Ragtime Source: Ragtime
“one day you stepped in snow, the next in mud, water soaked in your boots and froze them at night, it was the next worst thing to pure blizzardry, it was weather that wouldn't let you settle.” WesternSnowWeatherBlizzardFrontier And Pioneer Life Book:Welcome to Hard Times Source: Welcome to Hard Times
“She's some kind of Socialist-anarchist-anarcho-syndicalist-Communist. Unless you're one of them you can't tell exactly what any of them are.” Wry Book:Homer & Langley Source: Homer & Langley
“The ultimate technological achievement will be escaping from the mess we've made. There will be none after that because we will reproduce everything that we did on earth, we'll go through the whole sequence all over again somewhere else, and people will read my paper as prophecy, and know that having gotten off one planet, they will be able to destroy another with confidence.” Human Impact Book:Homer & Langley Source: Homer & Langley
“The bad news is that if we do in fact get off the earth we will contaminate the rest of the universe with our moral insufficiency.” Human Impact Book:Homer & Langley Source: Homer & Langley
“And why is Grant so solemn today upon our great achievement, except he knows this unmeaning inhuman planet will need our warring imprint to give it value, and that our civil war, the devastating manufacture of the bones of our sons, is but a war after a war, a war before a war.” Civil WarUlysses S GrantGeneral Sherman Author:E.L. Doctorow
“…and his religion no longer had any authority … other than as an organizer of his daily life and conduct as a filing system for his perceptions. From The Waterworks.” MysteryNew YorkWaterworks Author:E.L. Doctorow