You have a strange relationship with calamity when you’re a writer: you write about it; as an artist, you objectify and fetishize it. You render life into material, and that’s a creepy thing to do.
People are more easily manipulated when they don’t have information. If you ensure that kids grow up without basic reading skills, math skills, and so forth, then you ensure that they can’t act effectively.
Here’s the thing about politics: It’s not an expression of your moral purity and your ethics and your probity and your fond dreams of some utopian future. Progressive people constantly fail to get this.
Constitutional democracy has created astonishing and apparently irreversible social progress. All we’re interested in is talking about when government doesn’t work.
One of the things I love about my job as a playwright or as a screenwriter is that I get to do a lot of research and a lot of thinking and taking a lot of notes before I turn it in.
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?
I never imagined losing my mind was going to be such hard work.
You can’t live in the world without an idea of the world, but it’s living that makes the ideas. You can’t wait for a theory, but you have to have a theory.
It’s the price of rootlessness. Motion sickness. The only cure: to keep moving.
The Great Question before us is: Are we doomed? The Great Question before us is: Will the Past release us? The Great Question before us is: Can we Change? In Time? And we all desire that Change will come.
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.
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.
And the dead will be commemorated and we’ll struggle on with the living, and we are not going away. 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, each and every one. And I bless you: More Life. The Great Work Begins.
The fountain of Bethesda will flow again. And I told him I would personally take him there to bathe. We will all bathe ourselves clean.
I think, if you touch me, your hand might fall off or something. Worse things have happened to people who have touched me.
You do not live in America. No such place exists.
They got back the Senate but we have the courts. By the nineties the Supreme Court will be block-solid Republican appointees, and the federal bench – Republican judges like land mines, everywhere, everywhere they turn. Affirmative action? Take it to court. Boom! Land mine. And.
This disease will be the end of many of us, but not nearly all, and the dead will be commemorated and will struggle on with the living, and we are not going away. We won’t die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come.
I pray for God to crush me, break me up into little pieces and start all over again.
A person could theoretically love and maybe many do but we both know now you can’t.
It’s something you learn after your second theme party: It’s all been done before.