“Harper: In your experience of the world. How do people change?
Mormon Mother: Well it has something to do with God so it's not very nice.
God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your bloody tubes and they slip to evade his grasp but he squeezes hard, he insists, he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked out and the pain! We can't even talk about that. And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled and torn. It's up to you to do the stitching.
Harper: And then up you get. And walk around.
Mormon Mother: Just mangled guts pretending.
Harper: That's how people change.”
― Tony Kushner, quote from Angels in America
“I've lived through such terrible times and there are people who live through much worse. But you see them living anyway. When they're more spirit than body, more sores than skin, when they're burned and in agony, when flies lay eggs in the corners of the eyes of their children - they live. Death usually has to take life away. I don't know if that's just the animal. I don't know if it's not braver to die, but I recognize the habit; the addiction to being alive. So we live past hope. If I can find hope anywhere, that's it, that's the best I can do. It's so much not enough. It's so inadequate. But still bless me anyway. I want more life.”
― Tony Kushner, quote from Angels in America
“I hate America. I hate this country. It’s just big ideas, and stories, and people dying, and 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 can reach it. That was deliberate. Nothing on earth sounds less like freedom to me. You come to room 1013 over at the hospital, I'll show you America. Terminal, crazy and mean. I live in America, that’s hard enough, I don’t have to love it. You do that. Everybody’s got to love something.”
― Tony Kushner, quote from Angels in America
“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 creatures, each and every one. And I bless you: More Life. The Great Work Begins.”
― Tony Kushner, quote from Angels in America
“You'll find, my friend, that what you love will take you places you never dreamed you'd go.”
― Tony Kushner, quote from Angels in America
“I don't understand why I'm not dead. When your heart breaks, you should die”
― Tony Kushner, quote from Angels in America
“Belize: Hell or heaven?
[Roy indicates "Heaven" through a glance]
Belize: Like San Francisco.
Roy Cohn: A city. Good. I was worried... it'd be a garden. I hate that shit.
Belize: Mmmm. Big city. Overgrown with weeds, but flowering weeds. On every corner a wrecking crew and something new and crooked going up catty corner to that. Windows missing in every edifice like broken teeth, fierce gusts of gritty wind, and a gray high sky full of ravens.
Roy Cohn: Isaiah.
Belize: Prophet birds, Roy. Piles of trash, but lapidary like rubies and obsidian, and diamond-colored cowspit streamers in the wind. And voting booths.
Roy Cohn: And a dragon atop a golden horde.
Belize: And everyone in Balencia gowns with red corsages, and big dance palaces full of music and lights and racial impurity and gender confusion. And all the deities are creole, mulatto, brown as the mouths of rivers. Race, taste and history finally overcome. And you ain't there.
Roy Cohn: And Heaven?
Belize: That was Heaven, Roy.”
― Tony Kushner, quote from Angels in America
“One wants to move through life with elegance and grace, blossoming infrequently but with exquisite taste, and perfect timing, like a rare bloom, a zebra orchid... One wants... But one so seldom gets what one wants, does one?”
― Tony Kushner, quote from Angels in America
“I wish you would be more true to your demographic profile. Life is confusing enough.”
― Tony Kushner, quote from Angels in America
“Purple? Boy, what kind of a homosexual are you, anyway? That's not purple, Mary, that color up there is mauve.”
― Tony Kushner, quote from Angels in America
“I don't know what will happen to me without you. Only you. Only you love me. Out of everyone in the world.”
― Tony Kushner, quote from Angels in America
“The body is the garden of the soul.”
― Tony Kushner, quote from Angels in America
“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.”
― Tony Kushner, quote from Angels in America
“I never imagined losing my mind was going to be such hard work.”
― Tony Kushner, quote from Angels in America
“You’re a battered heart, bleeding life in the universe of wounds.”
― Tony Kushner, quote from Angels in America
“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.”
― Tony Kushner, quote from Angels in America
“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.”
― Tony Kushner, quote from Angels in America
“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.”
― Tony Kushner, quote from Angels in America
“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.”
― Tony Kushner, quote from Angels in America
“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.”
― Tony Kushner, quote from Angels in America
“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?”
― Tony Kushner, quote from Angels in America
“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.”
― Tony Kushner, quote from Angels in America
“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?”
― Tony Kushner, quote from Angels in America
“It's the price of rootlessness. Motion sickness. The only cure: to keep moving.”
― Tony Kushner, quote from Angels in America
“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.”
― Tony Kushner, quote from Angels in America
“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.”
― Tony Kushner, quote from Angels in America
“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.”
― Tony Kushner, quote from Angels in America
“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”
― Tony Kushner, quote from Angels in America
“I think, if you touch me, your hand might fall off or something. Worse things have happened to people who have touched me.”
― Tony Kushner, quote from Angels in America
“Sorry wrong room. (Prior exits, goes to Belize.) PRIOR (Despairing): He’s the Marlboro Man. BELIZE: Oooh, I wanna see.”
― Tony Kushner, quote from Angels in America
Tony Kushner
Born place: in New York, New York, The United States
Born date July 16, 1956
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“My mother used to say to me that she collected sorrows and put them in her pocket. Walking around with them that way, by and by, you just learn to carry them all a bit better, to stand up a bit straighter. That’s all life is, on this earth anyway.”
― Tananarive Due, quote from My Soul to Keep
“John had once said to me, in a complaining tone, that Father had taught us to be afraid of no man except him. And it was true. Father always insisted that we think for ourselves in every way, except when we disagreed with him, and that we hold ourselves independent of every man’s will, except his. He wanted us simultaneously to be independent and yet to serve him. Father was to be our Abraham; we were to be his little Isaacs. We were supposed to know ahead of time, however, the happy outcome of the story—we were supposed to know that it was a story, not about us and our willingness to lie on a rock on Mount Moriah and be sacrificed under his knife, but about our father and his willingness to obey his terrible God.”
― Russell Banks, quote from Cloudsplitter
“My anger subsides, I'd like to pee.”
― Samuel Beckett, quote from Endgame
“Good hips. Breed like cow, strong like bull, dumb like ox. Hitch to plow when horse dies.”
― Mercedes Lackey, quote from Oathbreakers
“That's why I tell stories: to create readiness, to nudge the people toward receptive insight. In their present state they can stare till doomsday and not see it, listen till they're blue in the face and not get it.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, quote from The Message Remix (Bible in Contemporary Language)
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