“Don't be afraid; people are so afraid; don't be afraid to live in the raw wind, naked, alone...Learn at least this: What you are capable of. Let nothing stand in your way.”
― Tony Kushner, quote from Millennium Approaches
“Respect the delicate ecology of your delusions.”
― Tony Kushner, quote from Millennium Approaches
“I just wondered what a thing it would be...if overnight everything you owe anything to, justice, or love, had really gone away. Free.
It would be...heartless terror. Yes. Terrible, and...
Very great. To shed your skin, every old skin, one by one and then walk away, unemcumbered, into the morning.”
― Tony Kushner, quote from Millennium Approaches
“Imagination can't create anything new, can it? It only recycles bits and pieces from the world and reassembles them into visions... So when we thing 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?”
― Tony Kushner, quote from Millennium Approaches
“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.”
― Tony Kushner, quote from Millennium Approaches
“My whole life has conspired to bring me to this place, and I can’t despise my whole life.”
― Tony Kushner, quote from Millennium Approaches
“I had a book of Bible stories when I was a kid. There was a picture I'd look at twenty times every day: Jacob wrestles with the angel. I don't really remember the story, or why the wrestling --just the picture. Jacob is young and very strong. The angel is...a beautiful man, with golden hair and wings, of course. I still dream about it. Many nights. I'm...It's me. In that struggle. Fierce, and unfair. The angel is not human, and it holds nothing back, so how could anyone human win, what kind of a fight is that? It's not just. Losing means your soul thrown down in the dust, your heart torn out from God's. But you can't not lose.”
― Tony Kushner, quote from Millennium Approaches
“Real love isn't ambivalent. I'd swear that's a line from my favorite best-selling paperback novel, "In Love with the Night Mysterious", except I don't think you've ever read it. Well, you ought to, instead of spending the rest of your life, trying to get through "Democracy in America." It's about this white woman whose daddy owns a plantation in the Deep South, in the years before the Civil War. And her name is Margaret, and she's in love with her daddy's number-one slave, and his name is Thaddeus. And she's married, but her white slave-owner husband has AIDS: Antebellum Insufficiently-Developed Sex-organs. And so, there's a lot of hot stuff going down, when Margaret and Thaddeus can catch a spare torrid ten under the cotton-picking moon. And then of course the Yankees come, and they set the slaves free. And the slaves string up old daddy and so on, historical fiction. Somewhere in there I recall, Margaret and Thaddeus find the time to discuss the nature of love. Her face is reflecting the flames of the burning plantation, you know the way white people do, and his black face is dark in the night and she says to him, "Thaddeus, real love isn't ever ambivalent.”
― Tony Kushner, quote from Millennium Approaches
“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.”
― Tony Kushner, quote from Millennium Approaches
“ROY [COHN]:Please. Let me finish.
Few people know this and I’m telling you this only because. . . . I’m not afraid of death. What can death
bring that I haven’t faced? I’ve lived; life is the worst.
(Gently mocking himself) Listen to me, I’m a philosopher.
Joe. You must do this. You must must must. Love, that’s a trap. Responsibility; that’s a trap, too. Like a father to a son I tell you this: Life is full of horror; nobody escapes, nobody; save yourself. Whatever pulls on you, whatever needs from you, threatens you. Don’t be afraid; people are so afraid; don’t be afraid to live in the raw wind, naked, alone. . . . Learn at least this: What you are capable of. Let nothing stand in your way.”
― Tony Kushner, quote from Millennium Approaches
“Children of the new morning, criminal minds. Selfish and greedy and loveless and blind.”
― Tony Kushner, quote from Millennium Approaches
“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.”
― Tony Kushner, quote from Millennium Approaches
“Maybe Christ will come again. Maybe seeds will be planted, maybe there’ll be harvests then, maybe early figs to eat, maybe new life, maybe fresh blood, maybe companionship and love and protection, safety from what’s outside, maybe the door will hold, or maybe . . . Maybe the troubles will come, and the end will come, and the sky will collapse and there will be terrible rains and showers of poison light, or maybe my life is really fine, maybe Joe loves me and I’m only crazy thinking otherwise, or maybe not, maybe it’s even worse than I know, maybe . . . I want to know, maybe I don’t. The suspense, Mr. Lies, it’s killing me.”
― Tony Kushner, quote from Millennium Approaches
“K.S., baby. Lesion number one. Lookit. The wine-dark kiss of the angel of death.”
― Tony Kushner, quote from Millennium Approaches
“PRIOR (An awestruck whisper): God almighty.
Very Steven Spielberg.”
― Tony Kushner, quote from Millennium Approaches
“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...”
― Tony Kushner, quote from Millennium Approaches
Tony Kushner
Born place: in New York, New York, The United States
Born date July 16, 1956
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“But it was not what I wanted to do! I wanted to star in a silent movie and vamp the sheik, take a trip to the South Seas … walk naked in the sand and surf … write a novel about it. Be the Empress of the Galaxy, be discovered by a hero that would ravish me, and take me away on high adventure! Take a interminable motor home trip across the US and find out how the past had become the present. Journey to Europe, speak flawless French, and become the courtesan in the country chalet where all the real people came to party.” She laughed again. “Mostly I did not want be confined to routine … endless routine.”
― William C. Samples, quote from Fe Fi FOE Comes
“...
'Keep on, then, seeking first the Kingdom and his righteousness, and all these other things will be added to you. So never be anxious about the next day, for the next day will have its own anxieties. Each day has enough of its own troubles.'
– Matthew 6:33, 34”
― quote from New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures
“There can have been no doubt in Eleanor's mind as to what was expected of her as a wife. In her day, women were supposed to be chaste both inside and outside marriage, virginity and celibacy being highly prized states. When it came to fornication, women were usually apportioned the blame, because they were the descendants of Eve, who had tempted Adam in the Garden of Eden, with such dire consequences. Women, the Church taught, were the weaker vessel, the gateway to the Devil, and therefore the source of all lechery. St. Bernard of Clairvaux wrote: "To live with a woman without danger is more difficult than raising the dead to life." Noblewomen, he felt, were the most dangerous so fall. Women were therefore kept firmly in their place in order to prevent them from luring men away from the paths of righteousness.
Promiscuity--and its often inevitable consequence, illicit pregnancy--brought great shame upon a woman and her family, and was punishable by fines, social ostracism, and even, in the case of aristocratic and royal women, execution. Unmarried women who indulged in fornication devalued themselves on the marriage market. In England, women who were sexually experienced were not permitted to accuse men of rape in the King's court. Female adultery was seen as a particularly serious offence, since it jeopardized the laws of inheritance.
Men, however, often indulged in casual sex and adultery with impunity. Because the virtue of high-born women was jealously guarded, many men sought sexual adventures with lower-class women. Prostitution was common and official brothels were licensed and subject to inspection in many areas. There was no effective contraception apart from withdrawal, and the Church frowned upon that anyway: this was why so many aristocratic and royal bastards were born during this period.”
― Alison Weir, quote from Eleanor of Aquitaine: A Life
“His expression was infused with lust and adoration as he lowered his head to kiss her throat, his tongue venturing into the little spaces between the diamonds and round opals. “Why can’t you see yourself as I see you?”
-Jack to Amanda”
― Lisa Kleypas, quote from Suddenly You
“The giant Grof was hit in one eye by a stone, and that eye turned inward so that it looked into his mind, and he died of what he saw there. -Cyrin”
― Patricia A. McKillip, quote from The Forgotten Beasts of Eld
Sugar
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Knight's Fork
An Affair Before Chr...
The Starfish and the...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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