How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
Children died of mild colds or slight rashes. Children died on beds made from two kitchen chairs pushed together. They died on floors. Many people believed that filth and starvation and disease were what the immigrant got for his moral degeneracy. (3.5)
Now you see why the immigrants were terrified of losing their children all the time... it happened a lot. No wonder later in the novel Tateh keeps Little Girl on a leash. Bad things happened to kids back then.
Quote #2
The Esquimos, who had no system but merely lived here, suffered the terrors of their universe. Sometimes the Esquimo women would unaccountably tear off their clothes and run into the black storms howling and rolling on the ice. Their husbands had forcibly to restrain them from killing themselves. (10.1)
When we're left to our own devices and have to face the emptiness of life and the fact that one day we're all gonna die, look out... we might just lose it. But is it better, in fact, to live life in the stiff-upper-lip manner of turn of the century Americans, or is that just as insane as running out onto ice floes?
Quote #3
The consumption of food was a sacrament of success. A man who carried a great stomach before him was thought to be in his prime. Women went into hospitals to die of burst bladders, collapsed lungs, overtaxed hearts and meningitis of the spine. (11.1)
And you thought America had an obesity problem now? Even back then, obsesity led to many diseases, illness and death. They might have been starving to death in the tenements and slums, but in the wealthier parts of American society they were eating themselves to death.
Quote #4
Working under the river they were subject to horrible destinies [...] One day there was a blowout so explosive that it sucked four workmen out of the tunnel and blew them through twenty feet of river silt and shot them up threw the river itself forty feet into the air on the crest of a geyser. Only one of the men survived. (13.1)
Yeah, work was dangerous back then. Really dangerous. And it wasn't like you had life insurance either. You went to work and tried to put food on the table and some days you just didn't come home. And if you weren't willing to do that, there were plenty of people willing to take your place.
Quote #5
[Morgan] thought he saw in Ford's use of men a reincarnation of pharaohism. Not only that: he had studied photographs of the automobile manufacturer and had seen an extraordinary resemblance to Seti I, the father of the great Ramses... (19.5)
There's having a high opinion of yourself, and then there's thinking you're a person who's reincarnated over and over again to give mankind a helping hand. Faced with the fact he's getting on in years (and scared of mortality) Morgan cooks this idea up in order to explain his and Ford's greatness.
Quote #6
Reincarnation is the only belief I hold, Mr. Morgan. I explain my genius this way—some of us have just lived more times than others. (20.15)
That's Ford explaining why he's been able to do things he's done. Like Morgan, his explanation is the fact that he's been here before. A comforting thought when you know that someday, like everyone else, you're gonna die.
Quote #7
He [Houdini] learned that she had called for him moments before her death. [...] He was tormented with guilt. He was obsessed with the idea that she had wanted to tell him something, that she had something to tell him that she could reveal only then, at the moment of her death. (27.9)
Talk about a mama's boy, right? This is the beginning of Houdini's death wish, and his obsession with death and the afterlife. Can he find out what she wanted to tell him? Is there some way she can still communicate with him? For the rest of his days, Houdini would hold out hope that somehow his mother would tell him what she couldn't before she died. No kidding.
Quote #8
Is the goddamn Ford your justice? said Younger Brother. Is your execution your justice? Coalhouse looked at him. As for my execution, he said, my death was determined the moment Sarah died. (38.17)
Don't mess with a man who's already decided he's going to die—he's got nothing to lose. Getting justice for the vandalism of his car isn't what this is about, and not even Booker T. Washington can understand that. Life isn't worth living for Coalhouse now that Sarah is gone.
Quote #9
Shortly after these adventures Pierpont Morgan suffered a sudden decline in health. [...] But he was far from unhappy, having concluded that his physical deterioration was exactly the sign for which he had been waiting. He was so urgently needed again on earth that he was exempt from the usual entombment rituals. (40.17)
Hey, if you thought you were part of a special class of people reincarnated every few generations for the benefit of mankind, you might view your death the same way.
Quote #10
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. (40.24)
Even in death, Father remains an immigrant, an alien to his surroundings. I guess when you're born into the wrong time, you can die in the wrong time too.