Parenting & Family Quote by Martin Scorsese

A Scorsese origin story without the romantic grime. He’s not bragging about “street credibility”; he’s describing a moral logistics problem: how do you build a workable code when the neighborhood’s default language is force? The line turns the Lower East Side into more than a backdrop. It becomes an ethics laboratory where the experiment keeps getting interrupted by real-world consequences.

The intent is quietly defensive, too. Scorsese frames his upbringing as a reason for his obsessions rather than an excuse for them. “I certainly wasn’t able to get it” suggests he once wanted clarity, maybe even peace, but couldn’t secure it because the environment kept rewriting the rules. That tension - between “the right way to live” and the violence “all around me” - is basically the engine of his filmography: characters who can articulate virtue, even yearn for it, yet find themselves trapped in systems where violence isn’t a failure of morality, it’s a form of social currency.

Subtextually, he’s pointing at how violence normalizes itself. He doesn’t say he witnessed it from a safe distance; he saw it “among the people I knew,” which collapses the comforting separation between monsters and neighbors. That proximity is what makes Scorsese’s work feel less like crime spectacle and more like confession: the brutality is intimate, familiar, almost communal.

Context matters: a kid in a mid-century immigrant neighborhood, later a Catholic filmmaker, trying to reconcile belief with observation. The quote explains why his movies don’t moralize from on high. They stare straight at the contradiction and refuse to let anyone off the hook, including the storyteller.