Millennium Approaches Quotes

“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, Millennium Approaches

“Respect the delicate ecology of your delusions.”
― Tony Kushner, 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, 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, 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, Millennium Approaches

“My whole life has conspired to bring me to this place, and I can’t despise my whole life.”
― Tony Kushner, Millennium Approaches

“I never imagined losing my mind was going to be such hard work.”
― Tony Kushner, Angels in America

“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, 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, Millennium Approaches

“You’re a battered heart, bleeding life in the universe of wounds.”
― Tony Kushner, 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, Angels in America

“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, Millennium Approaches

“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, Angels in America

“Children of the new morning, criminal minds. Selfish and greedy and loveless and blind.”
― Tony Kushner, Millennium Approaches

“I pray for God to crush me, break me up into little pieces and start all over again.”
― Tony Kushner, Millennium Approaches

“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, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes: Revised and Complete Edition

“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, Millennium Approaches

“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, Angels in America

“We have reached a veredict, your honor. This man's heart is deficient. He loves, but his love is worth nothing.”
― Tony Kushner, Millennium Approaches

“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, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes: Revised and Complete Edition

“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, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes: Revised and Complete Edition

“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, 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, Millennium Approaches

“She waited for him, she stitched for years. And if he had come back broken and defeated from war, she would have loved him even more. 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, Angels in America

“K.S., baby. Lesion number one. Lookit. The wine-dark kiss of the angel of death.”
― Tony Kushner, Millennium Approaches

“Sorry wrong room. (Prior exits, goes to Belize.) PRIOR (Despairing): He’s the Marlboro Man. BELIZE: Oooh, I wanna see.”
― Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes: Revised and Complete Edition

“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, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes: Revised and Complete Edition

“It's something you learn after your second theme party: It's all been done before.”
― Tony Kushner, Angels in America

“A person could theoretically love and maybe many do but we both know now you can't.”
― Tony Kushner, Angels in America

“Harper: 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. Don’t you think it’s depressing?

Prior: The limitations of the imagination?

Harper: Yes.”
― Tony Kushner, Angels in America