Tony Kushner Quotes

As long as nothing happens anything is possible.

My life used to be like that game of freeze tag we played as kids. Once tagged, you had to freeze in the position you were in. Whenever something happened, I'd freeze like a statue, too afraid of moving the wrong way, of making the wrong decision. The problem is, if you stand still too long, that's your decision.

Nobody is in the process of making any changes that we can be specific about.

The individual (no matter how well-meaning he might be, no matter how much strength he might have, if only he would use it) does not have the passion to rip himself away from either the coils of Reflection or the seductive ambiguities of Reflection; nor do the surroundings and times have any events or passions, but rather provide a negative setting of a habit of reflection, which plays with some illusory project only to betray him in the end with a way out: it shows him that the most clever thing to do is nothing at all.

Let's go." "We can't." "Why not?" "We're waiting for Godot.

Nothing is so exhausting as indecision, and nothing is so futile.

And there is a chance that everything we did was incorrect, but stasis is itself criminal for those with the means to move, and the means to weave communion between people.

And do not be paralyzed. It is better to move than to be unable to move, because you fear loss so much: loss of order, loss of security, loss of predictability.

He asked himself those some questions too many times and felt the fears again that kept him where he was

Doubt means don't. Don't move. Don't answer. Don't rush forward.

Anything that prevents you from taking an action or actions that might reasonably dispel legitimate anxieties. Fear is what paralyzes you.

I was twenty-one at the time, about to turn twenty-two. No prospect of graduating soon, and yet no reason to quit school. Caught in the most curiously depressing circumstances. For months I'd been stuck, unable to take one step in any new direction. The world kept moving on; I alone was at a standstill. In the autumn, everything took on a desolate cast, the colors swiftly fading before my eyes. The sunlight, the smell of the grass, the faintest patter of rain, everything got on my nerves.

We’re in the vanguard of a nameless battle, a battle without arms or bloodshed or glory: we’re in the vanguard of waiting.

The past is so often unknowable not because it is befogged now but because it was befogged then, too, back when it was still the present. If we had been there listening, we still might not have been able to determine exactly what Stanton said. All we know for sure is that everyone was weeping, and the room was full.

And so a person can never promise to love someone forever because you never know what might come up, what terrible thing the person you love might do.

Things can harden meaningfully in the moment of indecision

Withholding a decision is a decision.

Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born.

Thank God we can't tell the future. We'd never get out of bed.

To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.

I get the urge for going/But I never seem to go.

Our trouble is not ignorance, but inaction.

They weren't moving. Perhaps I was dazzling then with my ineptitude. It had happened before.

Believing nothing does whilst there remained anything else to be done.