How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
Women were stouter then. They visited the fleet carrying white parasols. Everyone wore white in summer. [...] Across America sex and death were barely distinguishable. Runaway women died in the rigors of ecstasy. Stories were hushed up and reporters paid off by rich families. One read between the lines of the journals and gazettes. (1.1)
This is the world as we enter it at the beginning of Ragtime, and yet, as you can tell by the language, things have already started to change. The trial of Harry K. Thaw will mark that change, as the scandalous testimony of Evelyn Nesbit leaves little to the imagination, creating in her America's first sex symbol.
Quote #2
In fact Sigmund Freud had just arrived in America to give a series of lectures at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, and so Houdini was destined to be, with Al Jolson, the last of the great shameless mother lovers, a nineteenth-century movement that included such men as Poe, John Brown, Lincoln and James McNeill Whistler. (5.9)
Here Doctorow points out that the ideas of one individual—in this case Freud—can be responsible for an entire shift in thinking. Freud's ideas about a mother's effect on their sons, specifically ideas like the Oedipal complex, would give negative connotations to close mother/son relationships.
Quote #3
America was a great farting country. All this began to change when Taft moved into the White House. His accession to the one mythic office in the American imagination weighed everyone down. [...] Thereafter fashion would the other way and only poor people would be stout. (11.1)
Presidents can change society, just by how they look and dress. When Kennedy became President and didn't wear a hat, men stopped wearing hats. Doctorow points out a similar thing with Taft, who weighed 332 pounds. Once people saw all that girth, they started trying to be thinner.
Quote #4
Some of these men saw the way Evelyn's face on the front page of the newspaper sold out the edition. They realized that there was a process of magnification by which news events established certain individuals in the public consciousness as larger than life. (11.3)
Congratulations, you just witnessed the creation of the first celebrity. That's what happened when businessmen realized that a pretty face will sell newspapers, or soap, or whatever else they wanted. This represented a big change from featuring people who had actually done something to be in the news, rather than just being attractive. Now you know why TMZ exists!
Quote #5
Father related it to the degrees of turn in the moral planet. He saw it everywhere, this new season, and it bewildered him. At his office he was told that the seamstresses in the flag department had joined a New York union. (14.1)
This is Father's reaction after returning home from the Arctic. He's lost in a country that has definitely changed while he's been away, from the way his wife acts to the way the maid acts. When he left, people knew their place, and that is rapidly changing.
Quote #6
It was evident to him that the world composed and recomposed itself constantly in an endless process of dissatisfaction. (15. 6)
This is Little Boy's idea of change, and it's pretty simple: something new comes along, people adapt to it and get sick of it, and then something else new comes along. That's change in a nutshell.
Quote #7
Father noted the skin mottling on the back of his hand. He found himself occasionally asking people to repeat to him what they'd said. [...] Once accustomed to life together after his return from the Arctic, they had slipped into an undemanding companionship in which he felt by-passed by life, like a spectator at an event. (29.2)
This is an important section because it shows not only the changes that happen in a marriage over time, but the feelings in Father as he realizes the world is changing without him. And, whether he realizes it or not, Mother is progressing with this new world while he is not.
Quote #8
Father remembered the baseball at Harvard twenty years before, when the players addressed each other as Mister and played their game avidly, but as sportsmen, in sensible uniforms before audiences of collegians who rarely numbered more than a hundred. He was disturbed by his nostalgia. He'd always thought of himself as progressive. (30. 4)
These are Father's feelings during a baseball game with his son, where the players curse and the game is not so innocent as it was when he was in college. It's at this moment, thinking he's progressive and changing with the time, that he realized instead he's an old man, nostalgic for a time that no longer exists.
Quote #9
The signs of the coming conflagration were everywhere. [...] The painters in Paris were doing portraits with two eyes on one side of the head. A Jewish professor in Zurich had published a paper proving that the universe was curved. None of this escaped Pierpont Morgan. (40.10)
This statement is a little facetious, though coming more from the point of view of J.P. Morgan we're not surprised he would be upset by the paintings of Picasso and the idea of Einstein. Their ideas will transform the 20th century, so it's understandable that Morgan might see them as a sign of not just turmoil, but a world war.
Quote #10
In New York the papers carried the news as one of those acts of violence peculiar to the Balkan States. Few Americans could have had any particular feeling of sympathy for the slain heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. (40.19)
Change isn't always apparent. Here we have the event that starts World War I, a major change if there ever was one, and the papers treat it as a ho-hum event. The lesson is that most of the time we don't see change coming... it has a way of starting out with something seemingly meaningless and then smacking us right in the face.