Ragtime Quotes

Apple Brandy?"
"It's for my tea," she explained. "Medicinal, you know."
"Medicinal?" The Reverend tried to hide a smile.
"Well, yeah," Maddy started to smile herself. "Without the brandy, it'd be just some crumpled up leaves floatin' in warm water ... and that'd just make me sick!"
Aunt Maddy from The Ragtime Coven ~ Bruce Jenvey

There are people who walk this Earth who truly belong in Hell. Sometimes, we have to move 'em along a little… point the way." --Vernon Kraft, Avenging Angel from The Ragtime Coven ~ Bruce Jenvey

The marriage seemed to flourish on Father's extended absences. " Ragtime ~ E.L. Doctorow

This interest in ragtime gives both of us the opportunity to be considered fashionably scandalous. ~ Frances Brody

What are a few false promises among friends, angel?"
"They're the difference between you and me ... that's what they are."
Vernon Kraft meets Ajax in The Ragtime Coven, coming soon! ~ Bruce Jenvey

In northwest Seattle, there is an immensely popular 'old-fashioned' ice cream parlor. It is modern, spotless, and gleaming, bursting with comfortable looking people on a warm summer evening. The parlor is dedicated to nostalgia, from the old-time decor to the striped candy, the ragtime music, the costumes of the smiling young waiters, the Gibson-girl menu with its gold-rush type, and the open-handed hospitality of the Old West. It serves sandwiches, hamburgers, and kiddie 'samiches,' but its specialty is ice-cream concoctions, all of them with special names, including several so vast and elaborate that they cost several dollars and arrive with so much fanfare that all other activities stop as the waiters join in a procession as guards of honor. Nobody seems to care that the sandwiches and even the ice cream dishes have a curious blandness, so that everything tastes rather alike and it is hard to remember what one has eaten. Nothing mars the insistent, bright, wholesome good humor that presses on every side. Yet somehow there is pathos as well. For these patrons are the descendants of pioneers, of people who knew the frontiers, of men who dared the hardships of Chilkoot Pass to seek gold in the Klondike. That is their heritage, but now they only sit amid a sterile model of the past, spooning ice cream while piped-in ragtime tinkles unheard. ~ Charles A. Reich

Ragtime was a fanfare for the 20th century. ~ Russell Lynes

...Her eyes, he says, are stars at dusk,
Her mouth as sweet as red-rose-musk;
And when she dances his young heart swells
With flutes and viols and silver bells;
His brain is dizzy, his senses swim,
When she slants her ragtime eyes at him...

Moonlight shadows, he bids her see,
Move no more silently than she.
It was this way, he says, she came,
Into his cold heart, bearing flame.
And now that his heart is all on fire
Will she refuse his heart's desire?―... ~ Conrad Aiken

I don't know if you picked up on the elephant in the room ... but we're witches. Angela, Andrea, me, and Evelyn and Celia back home.
Aunt Maddy from The Ragtime Coven ~ Bruce Jenvey

It's always Jazz. You can put a new dress on her, a new hat, but no matter what kind of clothes she's the same old broad. ~ Lionel Hampton

Ragtime plinking, glasses clinking, choruses getting sung with only half the lyrics right, giggles bubbling over like a tower of champagne.

It's a party, shaking down the dawn. ~ Catherynne M Valente

War changes everything. The world is never the same after a war. Any war. There are holes ... missing parts ... The best you can do is pick up the pieces that are left and start to build again. It'll never be the way it was before.
Vernon Kraft from The Ragtime Coven (coming later this year!) ~ Bruce Jenvey

What the hell are you doing here?" Ajax asked.
"Might ask you the same thing, 'cept the hell part would be a lot more relevant." --Vernon Kraft from The Ragtime Coven (coming soon!) ~ Bruce Jenvey

Improvisation was the blood and bone of jazz, and in the classic, New Orleans jazz it was collective improvisation in which each performer, seemingly going his own melodic way, played in harmony, dissonance, or counterpoint with the improvisations of his colleagues. Quite unlike ragtime, which was written down in many cases by its composers and could be repeated note for note (if not expression for expression) by others, jazz was a performer's not a composer's art. ~ Russell Lynes

My appearance was always good and my ability to play on the piano, especially ragtime, which was then at the height of its vogue, made me a welcome guest. ~ James Weldon Johnson

Roger (Kellaway) amazed us all. Blessed with great technique, he could play any style, from ragtime to space music. Whatever style he chose to play at the moment would be filled with wonderful surprises that kept the rest of us continually delighted. ~ Bill Crow

For instance, with "Ragtime" I was so desperate to write something, I was facing the wall of my study in my house in New Rochelle and so I started to write about the wall. That's the kind of day we sometimes have, as writers. Then I wrote about the house that was attached to the wall. It was built in 1906, you see, so I thought about the era and what Braodviw Avenue looked like then: trolley cars ran along the avenue down at the bottom of the hill; people wore white clothes in summer to stay cool. Teddy Roosevelt was president. One thing led to another and that's the way that book began: through desperation to those few images ... - 92nd Street YMHA Interview ~ E.L. Doctorow

I am often asked the question How can the masses permit themselves to be exploited by the few. The answer is By being persuaded to identify with them. ~ E.L. Doctorow

She wasn't quite sure what had happened that night. She hadn't seen this storm brewing on the horizon. The King of Ragtime was a hurricane, and somehow she'd forgotten to close one of her windows. She'd have to be more careful, next time. ~ Julie Berry

[Freud] "sat in his quiet cozy study in Vienna, glad to be back. He said to Ernest Jones, America is a mistake, a gigantic mistake." Ragtime ~ E.L. Doctorow

Lucifer sharpened his gaze and focused on Ajax. "Yes ... I want you to drive over to New Jersey, load those two corpses into your car and take them back to the Italians ... personally"
"In my car?"
"They haven't been in the water more than a week, Ajax."
"But actually ... inside?"
"Well," Lucifer's patience was fading, "If you tie them to the fenders like you're coming back from Deer Camp, the Italians might not find you quite as endearing ... "
Lucifer and Ajax from The Ragtime Coven ~ Bruce Jenvey

American musicians, instead of investigating ragtime, attempt to ignore it, or dismiss it with a contemptuous word. But that has always been the course of scholasticism in every branch of art. Whatever new thing the 'people' like is poohpoohed; whatever is 'popular' is spoken of as not worth the while. The fact is, nothing great or enduring, especially in music, has ever sprung full-fledged and unprecedented from the brain of any master; the best that he gives to the world he gathers from the hearts of the people, and runs it through the alembic of his genius. ~ James Weldon Johnson

I am the twentieth century. I am the ragtime and the tango; sans-serif, clean geometry. I am the virgin's-hair whip and the cunningly detailed shackles of decadent passion. I am every lonely railway station in every capital of Europe. I am the Street, the fanciless buildings of government. the cafe-dansant, the clockwork figure, the jazz saxophone, the tourist-lady's hairpiece, the fairy's rubber breasts, the travelling clock which always tells the wrong time and chimes in different keys. I am the dead palm tree, the Negro's dancing pumps, the dried fountain after tourist season. I am all the appurtenances of night. ~ Thomas Pynchon

Ragtime has about the same amount of respect as comics. And in a way they're similar art forms. Ragtime is highly compositional, and the emotion in the music is built in, whereas in jazz a lot of that emotion comes from the way it's performed. ~ Chris Ware