The Normal Heart & The Destiny of Me Quotes

“Almost more than talent you need tenacity, and an infinite capacity for rejection, if you are to succeed.”
― Larry Kramer, The Normal Heart & The Destiny of Me

“We’re all different in many ways and alike in many ways and special in some sort of way.”
― Larry Kramer, The Normal Heart & The Destiny of Me

“Don’t lose that anger. Just have a little more patience and forgiveness. For yourself as well.”
― Larry Kramer, The Normal Heart & The Destiny of Me

“No matter what any struggle accomplishes, time, life, death bring in their changes, and new oppressions are always forming from the ashes of the old.”
― Larry Kramer, The Normal Heart and the Destiny of Me

“And I always thought: the very simplest words Must be enough. When I say what things are like Everyone’s heart must be torn to shreds. That you’ll go down if you don’t stand up for yourself Surely you see that.”
― Larry Kramer, The Normal Heart and the Destiny of Me

“Progress is unimaginably difficult, dangerous, always at risk, always made by people with only partial vision.”
― Larry Kramer, The Normal Heart and the Destiny of Me

“Why listen to me? I can only predict epidemics and plagues.”
― Larry Kramer, The Normal Heart & The Destiny of Me

“The only safe place left is the dark.”
― Larry Kramer, The Normal Heart & The Destiny of Me

“How needy man is.”
― Larry Kramer, The Normal Heart & The Destiny of Me

“Where else in dramatic literature is there such a treatment of the life-and-death cycle of people and political change? One needs to reach back to the chronicles of Shakespeare, back to the Greeks. Larry Kramer isn't Sophocles and he isn't Shakespeare; we don't have Sophocleses or Shakespeares, not these days, but we do have, on rare occasion, remarkable accomplishment, and Kramer's is remarkable, invaluable, and rare. How else to dramatise revolution accurately, truthfully, politically, than by showing it to be tragic as well as triumphant? And on the other hand, if the medical, biological, political, and familial failures of "Destiny" produce, by the play's end, despair again; if we are plunged back into night, it cannot be different from the night with which "Normal Heart" began, rife with despair and terror, and pregnant with an offstage potential for transformation, for hope. Failure awaits any political movement, even a spectacularly successful movement such as the one Larry Kramer helped to spark and organise. Political movements, liberation movements, revolutions, are as subject to time, decline, mortality, tragedy, as any human enterprise, or any human being. Death waits for every living thing, no matter how vital or brilliant its accomplishment; death waits for people and for their best and worst efforts as well.politics is a living thing, and living things die. The mistake is to imagine otherwise, to believe that progress doesn't generate as many new problems as it generates blessings, to imagine, foolishly, that the struggle can be won decisively, finally, definitively. No matter what any struggle accomplishes, time, life, death bring in their changes, and new oppressions are always forming from the ashes of the old. The fight for justice, for a better world, for civil rights or access to medicine, is a never-ending fight, at least as far as we have to see. the full blooded description of this truth, the recognition and dramatisation of a political cycle of birth, death, rebirth, defeat, renewal - this is true tragedy, in which absolute loss and devastation, Nothing is arrived at, and from this Nothing, something new is born.”
― Tony Kushner, The Normal Heart & The Destiny of Me

“I have a life expectancy of ten more minutes I’m going to eat what I want to eat.”
― Larry Kramer, The Normal Heart and the Destiny of Me

“NED: I belong to a culture that includes Proust, Henry James, Tchaikovsky, Cole Porter, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Christopher Marlowe, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Tennessee Williams, Byron, E. M. Forster, Lorca, Auden, Francis Bacon, James Baldwin, Harry Stack Sullivan, john Maynard Keynes, Dag Hammarskjöld . . . These are not invisible men.”
― Larry Kramer, The Normal Heart and the Destiny of Me

“And all analogies to the Holocaust are tired, overworked, boring, probably insulting, possibly true, and a major turnoff.”
― Larry Kramer, The Normal Heart and the Destiny of Me

“Government research at the National Institutes of Health did not commence in reality until January 1983, eighteen months after the same government had declared the epidemic.”
― Larry Kramer, The Normal Heart and the Destiny of Me

“There is no such thing as the State And no one exists alone; Hunger allows no choice To the citizen or the police; We must love one another or die.”
― Larry Kramer, The Normal Heart and the Destiny of Me

“The great error has been to mistake the darkness for damnation, to surrender to immobility or worse, to try to retrace our steps backward to a safety that has ceased to exist or never existed.”
― Larry Kramer, The Normal Heart and the Destiny of Me

“American actors, historical, familial, political, theatrical, move blindly ahead toward a future that never is, and never can be, clear.”
― Larry Kramer, The Normal Heart and the Destiny of Me

“What seems to matter most to Larry Kramer is the incessant disruption of business as usual, the refusal to be silent or polite. This refusal is praiseworthy.”
― Larry Kramer, The Normal Heart and the Destiny of Me

“Larry Kramer’s speech is Jewish in the devotion it displays to the messianic conviction that the truth liberates if its precepts are entirely engaged with, and lived.”
― Larry Kramer, The Normal Heart and the Destiny of Me

“It’s happened before. It’s all happened before. History is worth shit.”
― Larry Kramer, The Normal Heart & The Destiny of Me

“We were the generation psychoanalysts tried to change.”
― Larry Kramer, The Normal Heart & The Destiny of Me

“The tyranny of the blood test.”
― Larry Kramer, The Normal Heart & The Destiny of Me

“You’re the cure? I hope you come in a portable version, like a laptop. Can you find me a boyfriend while you’re at it?”
― Larry Kramer, The Normal Heart & The Destiny of Me

“One should be able to have the man one loves.”
― Larry Kramer, The Normal Heart & The Destiny of Me

“Have you listened to your heart?”
― Larry Kramer, The Normal Heart & The Destiny of Me

“The system will always be here. The system doesn’t change.”
― Larry Kramer, The Normal Heart & The Destiny of Me

“FELIX: I thought I was supposed to be straight. She said I had been unfair to her, which I had been. I have a son. NED: You have a son? FELIX: She won’t let me see him. NED: You can’t see your own son? But didn’t you fight? That means you’re ashamed. So he will be, too.”
― Larry Kramer, The Normal Heart and the Destiny of Me

“NED: You have a son? FELIX: She won’t let me see him. NED: You can’t see your own son? But didn’t you fight? That means you’re ashamed. So he will be, too.”
― Larry Kramer, The Normal Heart and the Destiny of Me

“Nothing works for everybody.”
― Larry Kramer, The Normal Heart and the Destiny of Me

“The little boy in me still believes everything is possible. Mom, you taught me this. And you lied. But so does art and so does hope.”
― Larry Kramer, The Normal Heart and the Destiny of Me