Kushner Quotes

#1. Rabbi Kushner writes from a wealth of Jewish wisdom and pastoral devotion, but his theology is, I find, is wholly in keeping with contemporary Christian thought. So far as there is an answer to the conflict between the goodness of God and the bitterness of suffering, this is it

Gerald Priestland

#2. At least I never voted Republican. -Tony Kushner

Larry Smith

#3. I've been so lucky to work with some great, great writers: Tony Kushner and Yasmina Reza.

Marcia Gay Harden

#4. That's what's so striking about the title of Kushner's book: When Bad Things Happen to Good People. How is that fair?
Well, the answer to that is that there are no good people.

Peter Kreeft

#5. Thank you, Carol Lynn Pearson, for reminding us that the task of any religion is to teach us whom we're required to love, not whom we're entitled to hate. - Rabbi Harold Kushner

Carol Lynn Pearson

#6. I played Laura Bush in a Tony Kushner piece, and afterward, I think my phones got tapped.

Marcia Gay Harden

#7. Perhaps we would do well to listen to the likes of Rabbi Harold Kushner, who contends that God is not really as powerful as we have claimed.

Tony Campolo

#8. Kushner slipped up behind the vehicle. With the speed of a weasel, he pressed the muzzle of his revolver against the rear window and pulled the trigger. The bullet crashed into Kid Dropper's brain.

Norvell W. Page

#9. My aspiration to spend time at sea as requisite literary training died long ago, as a teenager, on a white-knuckled ferry ride to Elba during a torrential rainstorm [Kushner, Rachel, Diary, London Review of Books, January 14, 2015].

Rachel Kushner

#10. 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

#11. In some ways [the Internet]'s definitely an enemy.

Tony Kushner

#12. I think I have a great deal of self-hatred, a profound feeling of fraudulence, of being detestable and evil. It's only a part of me, but it's there, and it's active.

Tony Kushner

#13. The primary thing I should do, apart from being a good husband, brother, son, and friend, is to be a citizen activist. But I'm afraid it takes away from the writing. Not that anything depends on whether I put an essay in 'The Nation' or not. But you want to participate.

Tony Kushner

#14. He strengthened his body to keep up with his mind. He began lifting weights, practicing judo, and wrestling. One day after school, a bully tried to pick on Carmack's neighbor, only to become a victim of Carmack's judo skills.

David Kushner

#15. If you concentrate on finding whatever is good in every situation, you will discover that your life will suddenly be filled with gratitude, a feeling that nurtures the soul

Harold S. Kushner

#16. 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

#17. A novel is not a rant.

Rachel Kushner

#18. 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

#19. 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.

Tony Kushner

#20. You'll find, my friend, that what you love will take you places you never dreamed you'd go.

Tony Kushner

#21. In a way, film and television are in the same sort of traumatic trance that print journalism is. The technology has outpaced our comprehension of its implications.

Tony Kushner

#22. My older brother, Jake, and I had a bohemian childhood. My parents are deeply unconventional people from the beatnik generation. They weren't married, and I thought that was normal. We called them by their first names.

Rachel Kushner

#23. It's no secret that Cuba is a typical Latin American culture in that it has a fair amount of homophobia. Homosexuals have been notoriously persecuted under Fidel's government.

Rachel Kushner

#24. Sooner or later, we all learn that our immortality is rooted not in our professional involvements and achievements, but in our families. In time, all of our wins and losses in the workplace will be forgotten. If our memories endure, it will be because of the people we have known and touched.

Harold S. Kushner

#25. Love is not like a buffet line where the person in front of you threatens to take too much and leave too little for you. Love is like a muscle; the more it is exercised today, the more it can be used tomorrow.

Harold S. Kushner

#26. What cannot be achieved in one lifetime will happen when one lifetime is joined to another.

Harold S. Kushner

#27. To be fully and authentically human, we have to be prepared to take off the armor we usually go around wearing to keep the world from hurting us. We have to be prepared to accept pain, or else we will never dare to hope or to love

Harold Kushner

#28. Publishing is not my world.

Rachel Kushner

#29. To be a husband or wife, to be a parent, is inevitably to be aware of so many disappointing, exasperating things about your mate or child, but at the same time to see those people in depth, to see them with both eyes, and to be reminded of why you still love them.

Harold S. Kushner

#30. My whole life has conspired to bring me to this place, and I can't despise my whole life.

Tony Kushner

#31. There are some things we should feel guilty about, but the guilt feelings should attach to the deed, not to the doer.

Harold S. Kushner

#32. People are always alert to any change and skeptical by nature.

Jared Kushner

#33. I'm definitely scared about newspapers. The problem is nobody wants to catch a falling knife, and nobody knows where things will stabilise. The value of newspapers has dropped significantly. I think we still have more pain to be felt.

Jared Kushner

#34. The happiest people I know are people who don't even think about being happy. They just think about being good neighbors, good people. And then happiness sort of sneaks in the back window while they are busy doing good.

Harold S. Kushner

#35. She always had that empty look ... It's a particular blankness, and I've mostly seen it on billboards for so-called gentlemen's clubs. The convincing ones have that same empty look. Like they know just how to void themselves and not get in the way of some "gentleman's" fantasy.

Rachel Kushner

#36. 'Blood Meridian' was without question the novel that made me want to become a writer.

Rachel Kushner

#37. It explains why people come home from work or school and immediately switch on the television. They are not interested in the program much of the time, they do not even know what is on. But they are desperate for the sound of another human voice in their lives

Harold S. Kushner

#38. So that's what it's all about! You put your whole self in, you take your whole self out; you put your whole self in and you shake it all about. The idea is that by doing whatever you're doing with all of you, you can then take all of you out. The trick is how to do both.

Lawrence Kushner

#39. You don't become happy by pursuing happiness. You become happy by living a life that means something.

Harold S. Kushner

#40. As much as I hate his movies, Oliver Stone has an aspiration I admire, and that is that he wants his art to be part of what makes and changes public policy and cultural practice.

Tony Kushner

#41. One has to have a complicated kind of optimism. You can't refuse to look at how horrible things are.

Tony Kushner

#42. Authenticity is too big a subject to just toss in with the question about the photographs!

Rachel Kushner

#43. I know there are writers who like to say that every novel is hard, and it doesn't get easier. That may be the case, and I've only written two. But the first, to me, was characterized by an enduring oscillation between perseverance and a profound doubt.

Rachel Kushner

#44. 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

#45. God does not send the problem; genetics, chance, and bad luck do that. And God cannot make the problem go away, no matter how many prayers and good deeds we offer. What God does is promise us, I will be with you; you will feel burdened but you will never feel abandoned. In

Harold S. Kushner

#46. Roy: The immutable heart of what we are that bleeds through whatever we might become. All else is vanity.

Tony Kushner

#47. The way that same-sex marriage should reach the federal level is that it absolutely should be decided by the Supreme Court as quickly as possible. It's a 14th Amendment issue. There's no argument about it.

Tony Kushner

#48. Proust is a huge author for me.

Rachel Kushner

#49. I love my father, but I have worked to develop a separate and distinct identity in different projects I have worked on.

Jared Kushner

#50. Italy in the Seventies seems like a fascinating place.

Rachel Kushner

#51. What was it about scholarship and learning, he wondered, that seemed to wither the hearts of University men, leaving them incapable of loving anything as imperfect and fallible as an actual human being?

Ellen Kushner

#52. '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

#53. The net promoter score of health insurers averages 4/100. Amazon is 74/100.

Joshua Kushner

#54. There is no real appeal for me in an image of a woman on a motorcycle.

Rachel Kushner

#55. Is it ever acceptable to be angry at God? I would suggest that it is not only acceptable, it may be one of the hallmarks of a truly religious person. It puts honesty ahead of flattery.

Harold S. Kushner

#56. 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

#57. The VW doesn't make you think of Hitler and genocide. It's a breast on wheels, a puffy little dream.

Rachel Kushner

#58. 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

#59. You could argue that Barack Obama faced in '08 a situation as bad as any president since the Great Depression. What Obama inherited from the Bush administration, we all remember, was just an absolute global catastrophe.

Tony Kushner

#60. This is what it means to be human "in the image of God." It means being free to make choices instead of doing whatever our instincts
would tell us to do. It means knowing that some choices are good, and others are bad, and it is our job to know the difference.

Harold S. Kushner

#61. Story and plot, not historical facts, are the engine of a novel, but I was committed to working through the grain of actual history and coming to something, an overall effect, which approximated truth.

Rachel Kushner

#62. Writing is a way of living. It doesn't quite matter that there are too many books for the number of readers in the world to read them. It's a way of being alive for the writer.

Rachel Kushner

#63. When he thought he was doing something that made a difference to people, he could bear any burden [Moses]. When he lost that sense of achievement, he became too discouraged to keep on doing the hard things.

Harold S. Kushner

#64. Honest change? Honest? Has someone altered the definition of the word while my back was turned, or have you recently developed a sense of humor?

Ellen Kushner

#65. 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

#66. We can endure much more than we think we can; all human experience testifies to that. All we need to do is learn not to be afraid of pain. Grit your teeth and let it hurt. Don't deny it, don't be overwhelmed by it. It will not last forever. One day, the pain will be gone and you will still be there.

Harold S. Kushner

#67. Danzon is my favorite Cuban music, played by a traditional string orchestra with flute and piano. It's very formally structured but romantic music, which derives from the French-Haitian contradance.

Rachel Kushner

#68. A mystic is anyone who has the gnawing suspicion that the apparent discord, brokenness, contradictions and discontinuities that assault us every day might conceal a hidden unity.

Lawrence Kushner

#69. 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

#70. MATAMORE: I never fight with my love face on,
I worry that it might get scratched.

Tony Kushner

#71. I was doing that thing the infatuated do, stitching destiny onto the person we want stitched to us.

Rachel Kushner

#72. If you have value as an artist it's probably going to be in your capacity to let things inside you get past things that are placed there to keep you from telling the truth. The more you see things as clearly and coldly as you can, the more value you're going to have.

Tony Kushner

#73. Themes only arise after a novel is written, and people begin to try to talk about it.

Rachel Kushner

#74. The 1970s seemed particularly playful. People were trying to make work that couldn't be sold.

Rachel Kushner

#75. Purple? Boy, what kind of a homosexual are you, anyway? That's not purple, Mary, that color up there is mauve.

Tony Kushner

#76. Though games were barely acknowledged as a legitimate form of expression, let alone a legitimate art form, Tom was convinced that they were almost sublime forms of communication, just as films or novels. After

David Kushner

#77. The smallest indivisible human unit is two people, not one; one is a fiction. From such nets of souls societies, the social world, human life springs.

Tony Kushner

#78. now. The last free generation of kids had let their fears take away their kids' freedom. As

David Kushner

#79. The streets of New York are entirely man-made and unmistakably that, so you feel as though you're on some sort of presentation platform whenever you're out on the streets.

Tony Kushner

#80. When I talk to people who feel this emptiness and lack of fulfillment, I recommend they find a source of balance in their lives. I suggest they find a way to "give back" to the world in order to feel a sense of completeness ...

Harold S. Kushner

#81. You have time. Meaning don't use it, but pass through time in patience, waiting for something to come. Prepare for its arrival. Don't rush to meet it. Be a conduit.

Rachel Kushner

#82. About a third of my cases are suffering from no clinically defineable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives. This can be described as the general neurosis of our time.

Harold S. Kushner

#83. New York City is the most important location in the world ... it is the center for fashion, culture and finance.

Jared Kushner

#84. There is a Jewish notion that holiness is found with other people. To understand what life really is, one has to share it.

Harold S. Kushner

#85. My position would be to see Jesus and Paul as people used by God to bring the monotheism and the moral message of Judaism to the world, and to teach the world that the God discovered and worshiped by the Jews was the only true God.

Harold S. Kushner

#86. You're a battered heart, bleeding life in the universe of wounds.

Tony Kushner

#87. There is no right way to do a wrong thing.

Harold S. Kushner

#88. Pain is a part of being alive, and we need to learn that. Pain does not last forever, nor is it necessarily unbeatable, and we need to be taught that.

Harold S. Kushner

#89. The idea is to find some bit of holiness in everything-food, sex, earning and spending money, having children, conversations with friends. Everything can be seen as a miracle, as part of God's plan. When we can truly see this, we nourish our souls.

Harold S. Kushner

#90. Believing that you can move mountains sometimes is more important than actually having the ability to do so.

Joshua Kushner

#91. I have six jobs.

Jared Kushner

#92. The social dimension of the art world is fascinating to me, but I also want to entertain the reader, so I will let a character say something funny.

Rachel Kushner

#93. But I had seen, the night I met her, that her beauty was going to leave her like it does all women. For the face, time relays some essential message, and time is the message. It takes things away. But its passage, its damages, are all we have. Without it, there's nothing.

Rachel Kushner

#94. Politicians often say to me, 'Articles in the 'Observer' don't get me votes, but you get me money.'

Jared Kushner

#95. I could make it not matter.

Ellen Kushner

#96. Broadway remains the closest thing we have to a national theatre, the place where the greatest number of people can potentially see new work. For an American playwright to say it doesn't matter is simply to capitulate to the current situation.

Tony Kushner

#97. He had no reason to want to avenge Horn, and for Applethorpe no vengeance would ever be enough. It was natural for him to want to hurt the man who had been the instrument of his first adult grief; natural, but not right.

Ellen Kushner

#98. A forced contemplation of the heavens, crisp and angelic blue, a classic prelude to death.

Rachel Kushner

#99. You don't go to the movies to do historical research, unless it's historical research about the movies.

Tony Kushner

#100. We are here to finish God's labors ... so that we could be His partners in completing the work of creation.

Harold S. Kushner