Quotes from Tony Kushner

A compass, I learnt when I was surveying, it'll... it'll point you true north from where you're standing, but it's got no advice about the swamps, deserts and chasms that you'll encounter along the way. If in pursuit of your destination, you plunge ahead heedless of obstacles, and achieve nothing more than to sink in a swamp, what's the use of knowing true north?

HARPER: I don't understand why I'm not dead. When your heart breaks, you should die. But there's still the rest of you.

ROY (Fierce): I hurt. BELIZE: I'll get you a painkiller. ROY: Will it knock me out? BELIZE: I sure hope so. ROY: Then shove it. Pain's . . . nothing, pain's life. BELIZE: Sing it, baby.

I've always wondered . . . what if it really was Him, and He decided I wasn't worth it?

The fountain of Bethesda will flow again. And I told him I would personally take him there to bathe. We will all bathe ourselves clean.

I just wondered what a thing it would be...if overnight everything you owe anything to, justice, or love, had really gone away. Free.

We all romp about, grieving, wondering, but with rare exception we mostly remain suspended in the Rhetorical Colloidal Forever that agglutinates between Might and Do.

YOU HAVE TO ASK HARD QUESTIONS.

Justice precedes beauty. Without justice, beauty is impossible, an obscenity. And when beauty has gone, what does a cameraman do with his eye?

That it should be the questions and shape of a life, its total complexity gathered, arranged, and considered, which matters in the end, not some stamp of salvation or damnation that disperses all the complexity into some unsatisfying little decision - the balancing of scales...

She preferred silence. So I do not know her and yet I know her. She was . . . (He touches the coffin) . . . not a person but a whole kind of person, the ones who crossed the ocean, who brought with us to America the villages of Russia and Lithuania—and how we struggled, and how we fought, for the family, for the Jewish home, so that you would not grow up here, in this strange place, in the melting pot where nothing melted.

I think, if you touch me, your hand might fall off or something. Worse things have happened to people who have touched me.

Sorry wrong room. (Prior exits, goes to Belize.) PRIOR (Despairing): He's the Marlboro Man. BELIZE: Oooh, I wanna see.

You do not live in America. No such place exists.

They got back the Senate but we have the courts. By the nineties the Supreme Court will be block-solid Republican appointees, and the federal bench—Republican judges like land mines, everywhere, everywhere they turn. Affirmative action? Take it to court. Boom! Land mine. And

K.S., baby. Lesion number one. Lookit. The wine-dark kiss of the angel of death.

PRIOR (An awestruck whisper): God almighty. Very Steven Spielberg.

Oh you only think you know all I know. I don't even know what all I know. Half the time I just make it up, and it still turns out to be true! We learned that trick in the fifties. Tomorrow

Harper: When we think we've escaped the unbearable ordinariness and, well, untruthfulness of our lives, it's really only the same old ordinariness and falseness rearranged into the appearance of novelty and truth. Nothing unknown is knowable. Don't you think it's depressing? Prior: The limitations of the imagination? Harper: Yes.

MATAMORE: I never fight with my love face on, I worry that it might get scratched.

I pray for God to crush me, break me up into little pieces and start all over again.

I fooled you, Ethel, I knew who you were all along. I can't believe you fell for that ma stuff. I just wanted to see if I could finally, finally make Ethel Rosenberg sing!

I did my best Shirley Booth this morning, floppy slippers, housecoat, curlers, can of Little Friskies; "Come back, Little Sheba, come back..." To no avail. Le chat, elle ne reviendra jamais, jamais...

This disease will be the end of many of us, but not nearly all, and the dead will be commemorated and will 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.