Quotes from Tony Kushner

What used to be called liberal is now called radical, what used to be called radical is now called insane, what used to be called reactionary is now called moderate, and what used to be called insane is now called solid conservative thinking.

I don't know what will happen to me without you. Only you. Only you love me. Out of everyone in the world.

What makes the voice pathetic is that it doesn't know what kind of people it's reaching. Us. No one hears it, except us. This Age wanted heroes. It got us instead: carefully constructed, but immobile. Subtle but, unfit to take up the burden of the times. It happens. A whole generation of washouts. History says stand up, and we totter and collapse, weeping, moved, but not sufficient.

It's the price of rootlessness. Motion sickness. The only cure: to keep moving.

You're a battered heart, bleeding life in the universe of wounds.

It's no fun picking on you Louis; you're so guilty, it's like throwing darts at a glob of jello, there's no satisfying hits, just quivering, the darts just blop in and vanish.

When your heart breaks, you should die. But there's still the rest of you. There's your breasts, and your genitals, and they're amazingly stupid, like babies or faithful dogs, they don't get it, they just want him. Want him.

If He ever did come back, if He ever dared to show His face, or his Glyph, or whatever in the Garden again— if after all this destruction, if after all the terrible days of this terrible century, He returned to see how much suffering His abandonment had created, if all He has to offer is death, you should sue the bastard. That's my only contribution to all this theology: sue the bastard for walking out. How dare He.

You can't live in the world without an idea of the world, but it's living that makes the ideas. You can't wait for a theory, but you have to have a theory.

If the snake sheds his skin before a new skin is ready, naked he will be in the world, prey to the forces of chaos. Without his skin he will be dismantled, lose coherence and die. Have you, my little serpents, a new skin?

I try to tighten my heart into a knot, a snarl, I try to learn to live dead, just numb, but then I see someone I want, and it's like a nail, like a hot spike right through my chest, and I know I'm losing.

It can be very hard to accept how disappointing life is, Harper, because that's what it is, and you have to accept it. With faith and time and hard work you reach a point where ... where the disappointment doesn't hurt as much, and then it gets easy to live with. Quite easy. Which ... is in its own way a disappointment.

BELIZE: Louis, I'd even pray for you.      He was a terrible person. He died a hard death. So maybe . . . A queen can forgive her vanquished foe. It isn't easy, it doesn't count if it's easy, it's the hardest thing. Forgiveness. Which is maybe where love and justice finally meet. Peace, at least. Isn't that what the Kaddish asks for?

The Great Question before us is: Are we doomed? The Great Question before us is: Will the Past release us? The Great Question before us is: Can we Change? In Time? And we all desire that Change will come.

Harper: You, the one part of the real world I wasn't allergic to.

One has to have a complicated kind of optimism. You can't refuse to look at how horrible things are.

Opium is the perfect drug for people who want to remain articulate while being completely trivial.

And if he had returned mutilated, ugly, full of infection and horror, she would still have loved him; fed by pity, by a sharing of pain, she would love him even more, and even more, and she would never, never have prayed to God, please let him die if he can't return to me whole and healthy and able to live a normal life . . . If he had died, she would have buried her heart with him.      So what the fuck is the matter with me?

And the dead will be commemorated and we'll struggle on with the living, and we are not going away. We won't die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come. Bye now. You are fabulous, each and every one. And I bless you: More Life. The Great Work Begins.

Belize: I hate America, Louis. I hate this country. Nothing but a bunch of big ideas and stories and people dying, and then people like you. The white cracker who wrote the National Anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word free to a note so high nobody could reach it. That was deliberate.

Roy: The immutable heart of what we are that bleeds through whatever we might become. All else is vanity.

Seven characters are too many for a ten-minute play. It'll be twenty minutes long! Fuck it. One of them is dead and the others can all talk fast.

HANNAH: It can be very hard to accept how disappointing life is, Harper, because that's what it is, and you have to accept it. With faith and time and hard work you reach a point where . . . where the disappointment doesn't hurt as much, and then it gets easy to live with. Quite easy. Which . . . is in its own way a disappointment. But.      There.

Nothing's lost forever.