Kushner Quotes

This is what it
means to create: not to make something out of nothing, but to make order out of chaos. A creative scientist or historian does not make
up facts but orders facts; he sees connections between them rather than seeing them as random data. A creative writer does not
make up new words but arranges familiar words in patterns which say something fresh to us. ~ Harold S. Kushner

Constitutional democracy has created astonishing and apparently irreversible social progress. All we're interested in is talking about when government doesn't work. ~ Tony Kushner

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

Art is about play and about transcendent meanings, not reducible to politics. ~ Rachel Kushner

In some ways [the Internet]'s definitely an enemy. ~ Tony Kushner

The kids I knew growing up who worked on bikes all loved the smell of gas. It is the liquid agent for speed. ~ Rachel Kushner

I had a dream, in 1985, I believe, when a friend I'd gone to school with was sick - one of the first people I knew who'd gotten the AIDS virus. I had a dream of him in his bedroom with an angel crashing through the ceiling. I wrote a poem called 'Angels in America.' I've never looked at the poem since the day I wrote it. ~ Tony Kushner

A historical event represents the best and the worst of that moment. ~ Rachel Kushner

I don't regard the real and true and authentic as something to claim as a moral high ground. ~ Rachel Kushner

When you have a child, you start to dream of how this kid will grow up and make you proud. The only thing you can predict with 100% certainty is that the reality will diverge somehow from that dream. Some of our children will disappoint us by not being the scholars we hoped they would be. Some children will disappoint us by not being the athletes we hoped they would be. Some will disappoint us by coming out and telling us they are gay and they won't give us grandchildren ... the real question is not, what book can I read, what technique can I use to raise a perfect child? The real question is how will you handle that gap between the child you dreamt of having and the real child growing up in your home ... What I have learned is that any religion, if you do it wrong, will leave people feeling condemned and dismissed and unworthy and any religion, if you do it right, will leave people feeling cleansed and firmed. (118) Rabbi Harold Kushner ~ Carol Lynn Pearson

Although he was at core a rotten being, no one could fault him for style. ~ Ellen Kushner

New York City is the most important location in the world ... it is the center for fashion, culture and finance. ~ Jared Kushner

We teach children how to measure and how to weigh. We fail to teach them how to revere, how to sense wonder and awe. ~ Harold S. Kushner

Several recent authors have written of "the imposter phenomenon," describing the feeling of many apparently successful people that their success is undeserved and that one day people will unmask them for the frauds they are. ~ Harold S. Kushner

Prayer is simply coming into the presence of God. Because when you come into the presence of God, even the things you don't have matter a lot less. ~ Harold S. Kushner

Are you capable of forgiving and loving God even when you have found out that He is not perfect, even when He has let you down and disappointed you by permitting bad luck and sickness and cruelty in His world, and permitting some of those things to happen to you? Can you learn to love and forgive Him despite His limitations, as Job does, and as you once learned to forgive and love your parents even though they were not as wise, as strong, or as perfect as you needed them to be? ~ Harold S. Kushner

I don't read for plot, a story 'about' this or that. There must be some kind of philosophical depth rendered into the language, something happening. ~ Rachel Kushner

Harper: In your experience of the world. How do people change?
Mormon Mother: Well it has something to do with God so it's not very nice.
God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your bloody tubes and they slip to evade his grasp but he squeezes hard, he insists, he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked out and the pain! We can't even talk about that. And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled and torn. It's up to you to do the stitching.
Harper: And then up you get. And walk around.
Mormon Mother: Just mangled guts pretending.
Harper: That's how people change. ~ Tony Kushner

I grew up in Oregon, and then I lived in San Francisco and New York. ~ Rachel Kushner

Unions are susceptible to the same ills that befall all human societies. ~ Tony Kushner

Thanks to you, the leaders of the University branch - Masters Greenleaf and Smith - are safely out of harm's way. As to the Northern branch - well, my agent currently describes it as an association of young men, young and unmarried, who gather in the woods from time to time to celebrate elaborate rituals that draw equally from local folklore and a youthful taste for mysticism and indiscriminate copulation. We're watching them closely. ~ Ellen Kushner

The soul is not a physical entity, but instead refers to everything about us that is not physical - our values, memories, identity, sense of humor. Since the soul represents the parts of the human being that are not physical, it cannot get sick, it cannot die, it cannot disappear. In short, the soul is immortal. ~ Harold S. Kushner

Perhaps they suspected that I thought less of them because I knew it. (I'm too aware of human frailty to have let that happen. If anything, I thought more of them for wanting to face up to what they had done and for trying to change.) ~ Harold S. Kushner

You nourish your soul by fulfilling your destiny. ~ Harold S. Kushner

The purpose in life is not to win. The purpose in life is to grow and to share. When you come to look back on all that you have done in life, you will get more satisfaction from the pleasure you have brought into other people's lives than you will from the times that you outdid and defeated them. ~ Harold S. Kushner

When Moses says, "Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh?" God answers not by telling Moses who he is, but by telling him who God is, saying, "I will be with you" (Exodus 3:12) ~ Harold S. Kushner

I steer clear of books with ugly covers. And ones that are touted as 'sweeping,' 'tender' or 'universal.' ~ Rachel Kushner

When you see something that is broken, fix it. When you find something that is lost, return it. When you see something that needs to be done, do it. In that way, you will take care of your world and repair creation. ~ Lawrence Kushner

Utterly ingenious! Tiffany Trent has more fine invention at her fingertips than a roomful of magical Leonardos! ~ Ellen Kushner

'The Observer's Very Short List' is another example of how the Observer Media Group offers its readers the most cutting-edge information, available in a variety of platforms and written by an editorial staff known for its distinctive and discerning style and wit. ~ Jared Kushner

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

The problem is we have a standard of what evil is, Hitler, the Holocaust - THE standard of absolute evil. . . . But then everyone gets frantic as soon as you try to use the standard, nothing compares, nothing resembles - and the standard becomes unusable and nothing qualifies as Evil with a capital E. . . . I mean like a certain ex-actor-turned-president who shall go nameless sat idly and I do mean idly by and watched tens of thousands die of a plague and he couldn't even bother to say he felt bad about it, much less try to help . . . I mean do you have to pile up some magic number of bodies before you hit the jackpot and rare a comparison with you-know-who? ~ Tony Kushner

A good book tells a story, and the reader is either pleased or displeased, intrigued or bored. A great book invites the reader to respond, to argue, to challenge. ~ Harold S. Kushner

Being kind to others is a way of being good to yourself. ~ Harold S. Kushner

I'm happy that I feel a little less out of place in filmmaking than I once was - but it's almost impossible for a playwright in the U.S. to make a living. You can have a play, like I did with 'Angels,' and it still generates income for me, but it's not enough for me to live on and have health insurance. ~ Tony Kushner

If the snake sheds his skin before a new skin is ready, naked he will be in the world, prey to the forces of chaos. Without his skin he will be dismantled, lose coherence and die. Have you, my little serpents, a new skin? ~ Tony Kushner

I don't write political plays in the sense that I'm writing essays that are kind of disguised as plays. I would really defy anyone to watch any of my plays and say 'Well, here's the point.' ~ Tony Kushner

The way you give love is the most profoundly human part of you. When people say it's ugly or a perversion or an abomination, they're attacking the center of your being. ~ Tony Kushner

Why bad things happen to good people ~ Harold S. Kushner

When you carry out acts of kindness you get a wonderful feeling inside. It is as though something inside your body responds and says, yes, this is how I ought to feel. ~ Harold Kushner

Success is a completely abstract thing - it has no bearing on daily life, family matters, the matter of artistic creation, but it can affect grace, and if I lose that, I really have gained nothing from success. ~ Rachel Kushner

In writing novels, you have to believe in yourself or there would be no way to sustain it. But you also have to give good evidence regularly for having that faith in self-either with quality goods or with, at least, "good efforts." Working hard will do when inspiration is not forthcoming. ~ Rachel Kushner

A forced contemplation of the heavens, crisp and angelic blue, a classic prelude to death. ~ Rachel Kushner

When your life is filled with the desire to see the holiness in everyday life, something magical happens: Ordinary life becomes extraordinary, and the very process of life begins to nourish your soul. ~ Harold S. Kushner

now. The last free generation of kids had let their fears take away their kids' freedom. As ~ David Kushner

I am not a sun person at all. I think it's a cancerous poison and I don't want it touching me. ~ Rachel Kushner

Reality, in a sense, was not an objective place where you were thrust. You had to maintain your hold on it by vigilantly keeping watch over whatever slight and intangible thing gave your life its meaning. Call it a soul, or presence. Whatever it was, a prisoner or guest and you had to trick it or petition it into lingering. ~ Rachel Kushner

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

The woman in the film drinks in a bar. She's in hair curlers, a chiffon headscarf tied over them like a tarp over a log pile. The hollows of the curlers, spaces for hope: something good might happen.

There was no sign of Sandro. I watched the film to keep myself awake while I waited.

A man bought the woman a beer. She took dainty sips in her hair curlers, in preparation for no specific occasion. Curler time seemed almost religious, a waiting that was more important than what the waiting was for. Curler time was about living the now with a belief that a future, an occasion for set hair, existed. ~ Rachel Kushner

To be alive is to listen quietly while other people talk. That's how you learn something. ~ Rachel Kushner

The one who pays attention to the dreams, draws on them, and lives them out is blessed, even as the one who dreams is also dreamt. We each take our turn at living out the dream. Like some ageless wave, Scripture flows through us. ~ Lawrence Kushner

I'm drawn in some strangely natural way to immersing myself in a milieu whose rules I don't understand, where there are things you can't access simply by being intelligent or doing well in school. ~ Rachel Kushner

Sometimes they just sit. Sometimes one turns on a radio and they listen to music, or to the news, but they don't care about the actual news, just that the radio is issuing a steadyish sound whose particulars they do not have to follow to understand what the radio is actually telling them: life is being lived. No need to be a part of it as long as you know it's streaming. ~ Rachel Kushner

I'm very interested in the idea of a large group of people who come together quite suddenly, but not illogically, for reasons that could not have been anticipated. ~ Rachel Kushner

You don't become happy by pursuing happiness. You become happy by living a life that means something. ~ Harold S. Kushner

I have six jobs. ~ Jared Kushner

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

Not being the sort to throw a book, she pounded her fist on her cushion. ~ Ellen Kushner

You learn that existence is legible but that you have to have a critical mind if you're going to read it. ~ Tony Kushner

The answer is not coming. I have to find an arbitrary point inside the spell of waiting, the open absence, and tear myself away. Leave, with no answer. Move on to the next question. ~ Rachel Kushner

I'm a kind person; I don't have a really nihilist streak in me, but I respond to that kind of humour. ~ Rachel Kushner

But I saw the pair of them, along with everyone else. Hard to miss. Him towering like a raggedy scarecrow in that flapping black scholar's gown, and the sword always quiet next to him, sweet as honey, and poison with it. ~ Ellen Kushner

Only those who have not paid a high price for the gentle joy of living and breathing can allow themselves feelings of melancholy, denial and lofty disdain of life. ~ Alexander Kushner

I don't believe in the model of pure inspiration. All of my creative work stems from a dialogue with others. ~ Rachel Kushner

I usually get up between 7 A.M. and 8 A.M., have coffee, and go right to work. It's really important not to get sidetracked in the morning so I'm still in that dreamy state for my writing. ~ Rachel Kushner

At the end of Th Brother's K, Alyosha asks the children to always remember the good feeling they share, in praising and celebrating the life of their beloved dead friend, the lost child.

Remember this always, Alyosha says, and he means, as an antidote. Retain the innocence of the most wholesome feeling you ever had in your life. Part of you stays innocent forever. That part of you is worth more than the rest. ~ Rachel Kushner

There's a way in which 'The Illusion' is a play about the theater. ~ Tony Kushner

A compass, I learnt when I was surveying, it'll ... it'll point you true north from where you're standing, but it's got no advice about the swamps, deserts and chasms that you'll encounter along the way. If in pursuit of your destination, you plunge ahead heedless of obstacles, and achieve nothing more than to sink in a swamp, what's the use of knowing true north? ~ Tony Kushner

People who are harder to love pose a challenge, and the challenge makes them easier to love. You're driven to love them. People who want their love easy don't really want love. ~ Rachel Kushner

The work of artists is to find what's humanly possible - possibility's furthest reaches. ~ Tony Kushner

If you have been brave enough to love, and somtimes you won and sometimes you lost; if you have cared enough to try, and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't; if you have been bold enough to dream and found yourself with some dreams that came true and a lot of broken pieces of dreams that didn't, that fell to earth and shattered,then you can look back from the mountaintop you now find yourself standing on, like Moses contemplating the tablets that would guide human behavior for a millenia, resting in the Ark alongside the broken fragments of an earlier dream. And you, like Moses, can realize how ful your life has been and how richly you are blessed. ~ Harold S. Kushner

I don't like the info-dump, as it's known. ~ Rachel Kushner

HANNAH: You had a vision.
PRIOR: A vision. Thank you, Maria Ouspenskaya. I'm not so far gone I can be assuaged by pity and lies.
HANNAH: I don't have pity. It's just not something I have.
(Little pause)
One hundred and seventy years ago, which is recent, an angel of God appeared to Joseph Smith in upstate
New York, not far from here. People have visions.
PRIOR: But that's preposterous, that's ...
HANNAH: It's not polite to call other people's beliefs preposterous.
He had great need of understanding. Our Prophet. His desire made prayer. His prayer made an angel. The angel was real. I believe that.
PRIOR: I don't. And I'm sorry but it's repellent to me. So much of what you believe.
HANNAH: What do I believe?
PRIOR: I'm a homosexual. With AIDS. I can just imagine what you ...
HANNAH: No you can't. Imagine. The things in my head.
You don't make assumptions about me, mister; I won't make them about you. ~ Tony Kushner

I don't really see art as structured by logic. ~ Rachel Kushner

People are complicated. Personally I don't go in for puritanical people. ~ Rachel Kushner

But it is a historical fact that the Jews, and no one else, gave the world the Bible. It is a historical fact that the Jews introduced to the pagan world the idea of a God who demanded righteousness......Even most of the books of the New Testament were written by Jews. ~ Harold S. Kushner

Love is the world's infinite mutability; lies, hatred, murder even, are all knit up in it; it is the inevitable blossoming of its opposites, a magnificent rose smelling faintly of blood. ~ Tony Kushner

I don't really have those kinds of intentions when I write a scene. I try to follow the internal logic of the fiction, rather than make an argument or an assertion. ~ Rachel Kushner

I don't think you have to earn your income as an artist to be an artist. But if you are an artist, then art is what you do, whether or not you're paid for doing it; it is what you do, not what you are. I regard artist not as a description of temperament but as a category of profession, of vocation. ~ Tony Kushner

... if a thing can be said to be, to exist, then such is the nature of these expansive times that this thing which is must suffer to be touched. Ours is a time of connection; the private, and we must accept this, and it's a hard thing to accept, the private is gone. All must be touched. All touch corrupts. All must be corrupted. And if you're thinking how awful these sentiments are, you are perfectly correct, these are awful times, but you must remember as well that this has always been the chiefest characteristic of the Present, to everyone living through it; always, throughout history, and so far as I can see for all the days and years to come until the sun and the stars fall down and the clocks have all ground themselves to expiry and the future has long long shaded away into Time Immemorial: the Present is always an awful place to be. ~ Tony Kushner

But I still read Shaw on a regular basis. What I love is the nakedness of the polemic and the irresistible good humour. For me, 'Major Barbara' is the greatest of all the plays in that it starts from the rational and proceeds to the ecstatic in a spectacular way, and leaves you very confused if you cling to Euclidean logic. ~ Tony Kushner

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

So I think I'll say the obvious thing: theater is ephemeral. When a production is done, it's gone forever. You can take pictures of it. You can make a film of it. But it's not the production. It's not the same thing. ~ Tony Kushner

Respect the delicate ecology of your delusions. ~ Tony Kushner

Look, look at my country, look at my Kabul, my city, what is left of my city? The streets are as bare as mountains now, the buildings are as ragged as mountains and as bare and empty of life, there is no life here only fear, we do not live in the buildings now, we live in terror in the cellars in the caves in the mountains, only God can save us now, only order can save us now, only God's Law harsh and strictly administered can save us now, only The Department for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice can save us now, only terror can save us from ruin, only neverending war, save us from terror and neverending war, save my wife they are stoning my wife, they are chasing her with sticks, save my wife save my daughter from punishment by God, save us from God, from war, from exile, from oil exploration, from no oil exploration, from the West, from the children with rifles, carrying stones, only children with rifles, carrying stones, can save us now. ~ Tony Kushner

When facing a dilemma, choose the more morally demanding alternative. ~ Harold S. Kushner

Hold up your hands before your eyes. You are looking at the hands of God. ~ Lawrence Kushner

It's a cliche, and in a way it's a conservative idea about fiction, but I did learn the hard way that plot does need to dictate the story. ~ Rachel Kushner

At some of the darkest moments in my life, some people I thought of as friends deserted me-some because they cared about me and it hurt them to see me in pain; others because I reminded them of their own vulnerability, and that was more than they could handle. But real friends overcame their discomfort and came to sit with me. If they had not words to make me feel better, they sat in silence (much better than saying, "You'll get over it," or "It's not so bad; others have it worse") and I loved them for it. ~ Harold S. Kushner

One man alone can't defeat the forces of evil, but many good people coming together can. ~ Harold S. Kushner

We have confused God with Santa Claus. And we believe that prayer means making a list of everything you don't have but want and trying to persuade God you deserve it. Now I'm sorry, that's not God, that's Santa Claus. ~ Harold S. Kushner

Politicians often say to me, 'Articles in the 'Observer' don't get me votes, but you get me money.' ~ Jared Kushner

She smiled at him like they were about to rob a bank together. ~ Rachel Kushner

Growing up, I was not told that there were women's areas of preoccupation or male ones. ~ Rachel Kushner

We are getting older fatter and balder. Each day brings us one step closer to death. Other than that, life's a ding-a-derry. ~ M. Kushner

how he once slipped through the "scriptural text" of his daily life into the primordial light of consciousness itself. ~ Lawrence Kushner

I am occasionally enraptured by Western landscape. But I don't identify that state of mind as having to do with my own origins, having grown up in the West, although I certainly crisscrossed Nevada countless times growing up, and then as a young adult, in cars and on motorcycles. ~ Rachel Kushner

A novel is not a rant. ~ Rachel Kushner

Gloria was still talking, something about how shooting people was in a sense safer than making art, in terms of avoiding serious lapses in taste. ~ Rachel Kushner

At home, I dedicate occasional whole days to reading as if I'm a convalescent. The ideal place for this is the bath, where the body floats free. Books go a little wavy, but they're mine, so who cares. ~ Rachel Kushner