Tony Kushner Quotes

“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 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.”

“We have reached a verdict your honor. This man’s heart is deficient. He loves, but his love is worth nothing.”

“I think we ought to pray. Ask God for help. Ask him together.”

“I don’t understand why I’m not dead. When your heart breaks, you should die”

“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 last. Isn’t that what the Kaddish asks for?”

“I never imagined losing my mind was going to be such hard work.”

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

“All I will say is that I’m a very good man who has worked very hard to become good and you wanna destroy that. You wanna destroy me but I am not gonna let you do that.”

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

“I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”

“There are no gods here, no ghosts and spirits in America, there are no angels in America, no spiritual past, no racial past, there’s only the political, and the decoys and the ploys to maneuver around the inescapable battle of politics”

“I wish you would be more true to your demographic profile. Life is confusing enough.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“The body is the garden of the soul.”

“You’re a battered heart, bleeding life in the universe of wounds.”

“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.”

“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.”