Tony Kushner Quotes

33 Sourced Quotes

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.

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

Tony Kushner
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
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
Catholics believe in forgiveness. Jews believe in guilt.

Tony Kushner
A play should have barely been rescued from the mess it might just as easily have been.

Tony Kushner
People in a boat, waiting, terrified, while implacable, unsmiling men, irresistibly strong, seize... maybe the person next to you, maybe you, and with no warning at all, with time only for a quick intake of air you are pitched into freezing, turbulent water and salt and darkness to drown.

Tony Kushner
It's the fear of what comes after the doing that makes the doing hard to do.

Tony Kushner
You'll find, my friend, that what you love will take you places you never dreamed you'd go.

Tony Kushner
In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead.

Tony Kushner
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
We can't just stop. We're not rocks-progress, migration, motion is... modernity. It's ANIMATE, it's what living things do. We desire. Even if all we desire is stillness, it's still desire for...

Tony Kushner
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...

Tony Kushner
Before the boiling of blood and the searing of skin comes the secret catastrophe: Before Life on Earth becomes finally merely impossible, it will for a long time before have become completely unbearable.

Tony Kushner
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
In the modern era, it isn't enough to write, you must also be the Writer, with a capital 'W,' and play your part as the protagonist in the cautionary narrative in which you will fail or triumph, be in or out, hot or cold, ride the wheel of fortune.

Tony Kushner
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.

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

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

Tony Kushner
I don't understand why I'm not dead. When your heart breaks, you should die.

Tony Kushner
When I started to write these plays, I wanted to attempt something of ambition and size even if that meant I might be accused of straying too close to ambition's ugly twin, pretentiousness.

Tony Kushner
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.

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

Tony Kushner
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
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
My whole life has conspired to bring me to this place, and I can't despise my whole life.

Tony Kushner
You have a good heart and you think the good thing is to be guilty and kind but it's not always kind to be gentle and soft, there's a genuine violence softness and kindness visit on people. Sometimes self-interested is the most generous thing you can be.

Tony Kushner
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