
Top 100 Kushner's Quotes
#1. 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
#2. It's the fear of what comes after the doing that makes the doing hard to do.
Tony Kushner
#3. I am just getting into Zora Neale Hurston, who is possibly a much better writer than the critics and rivals who tried to erase her from history, resulting in a life in which she worked as a maid and died in a welfare nursing home. She's clever. She does something modern to the sentence.
Rachel Kushner
#4. Do things for people not because of who they are or what they do in return, but because of who you are
Harold S. Kushner
#5. We cannot live without the knowledge that someone cares about us.
Harold S. Kushner
#7. Many biblical verses are like inkblot tests, revealing more about us than about the text in question.
Harold S. Kushner
#8. It's no fun picking on you Louis; you're so guilty, it's like throwing darts at a glob of jello, there's no satisfying hits, just quivering, the darts just blop in and vanish.
Tony Kushner
#9. In the Ways, ji connotes skill and ri connotes inspiration. When one sees into the underlying principles, one's performance becomes inspired.
Kenneth Kushner
#10. 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
#11. The circumstances of your life have uniquely qualified you to make a contribution. And if you don't make that contribution, nobody else can make it.
Harold S. Kushner
#12. I like Baudelaire's sentences quite a lot. I read and re-read him very often.
Rachel Kushner
#13. Theatre for a New Audience is one of America's most admirable and exciting theatre companites ... some of the best acted and directed work to be found on American stages, engaging with the canon of world dramatic literature in a vigorous way.
Tony Kushner
#14. People who live in SoHo want to be close to the energy, culture, and eccentricities of New York's most charming neighborhoods.
Jared Kushner
#15. I am convinced that it is not the fear of death, of our lives ending that haunts our sleep so much as the fear ... that as far as the world is concerned, we might as well never have lived.
Harold S. Kushner
#16. If you're gay and you can't hold hands, or you're black and you can't catch a taxi, or you're a woman and you can't go into the park, you are aware there's a menace. That's costly on a psychic level. The world should be striving to make all its members secure.
Tony Kushner
#17. One man alone can't defeat the forces of evil, but many good people coming together can.
Harold S. Kushner
#18. We are here to change the world with small acts of thoughtfulness done daily rather than with one great breakthrough.
Harold S. Kushner
#20. I don't think a woman riding a motorcycle thinks of herself as doing something that has sex appeal. I think she's trying to replicate for herself an experience that she sees men having.
Rachel Kushner
#21. What had actually been in Valera's haversack: not a woman's vulva but grenades, a gas mask, a gun that constantly jammed.
Rachel Kushner
#22. God is like a mirror. The mirror never changes, but everybody who looks at it sees something different.
Harold S. Kushner
#24. I remember a rainbow spectrum of men's wing tips parked in rows, triple-A narrow, the leather dyed snake green, lemon yellow, and unstable shades of vermilion and Ditto-ink blue. All of humanity dresses in uniforms of one sort or another, and these shoes were for pimps.
Rachel Kushner
#25. For all those people who wanted to go on believing, but whose anger at God made it hard for them to hold on to their faith and be comforted by religion.
Harold S. Kushner
#26. Think about it: it is easy to see God's beauty in a glorious sunset or in ocean waves crashing on a beach. But can you find the holiness in a struggle for life?
Harold S. Kushner
#27. For me, truth cracks open in the places where things do not cohere. That's how life is.
Rachel Kushner
#28. The general consensus among historians, among the ones who can handle the fact that 'Lincoln' is, in fact, historical fiction, is that we demonstrate enormous fidelity to history and that, beyond that, we've actually contributed a line of thinking about Lincoln's presidency that's somewhat original.
Tony Kushner
#29. The path to God is rarely a steady climb upward. We climb, we fall back, and we climb higher again.
Harold S. Kushner
#30. Fun can be the dessert of our lives but never its main course.
Harold S. Kushner
#31. I'd say it's okay to be political and to be a writer. Those streams can be separate, and they can be connected; for me, they're both. Life is political, and I'm interested in my community and in a lot of issues - some of them American, some global.
Rachel Kushner
#32. 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
#33. A masterwork. A particularly American magic realism that touches the heart of race and childhood in our country; it's 100 Years of Solitude for an entire generation of American Baby Boomers, and deserves the widest possible audience.
Ellen Kushner
#35. Our human bodies are miracles, not because they defy laws of nature, but precisely because they obey them.
Harold S. Kushner
#36. K.S., baby. Lesion number one. Lookit. The wine-dark kiss of the angel of death.
Tony Kushner
#37. Life is like the baseball season, where even the best team loses at least a third of its games, and even the worst team has its days of brilliance. The goal is not to win every game but to win more than you lose, and if you do that often enough, in the end you may find you have won it all.
Harold S. Kushner
#38. One of the basic needs of every human being is the need to be loved, to have our wishes and feelings taken seriously, to be validated as people who matter.
Harold S. Kushner
#39. In short, I'm pretty suspicious of the idea that there's a real and true and authentic world, and then a bunch of false ones.
Rachel Kushner
#40. Our society puts too much emphasis on finding someone who will love you; our culture focuses too much on being loved and not enough on being a loving person.
Harold S. Kushner
#41. There's the road to heaven, and there's the road to hell, and there? That's the road to Faerie.
Ellen Kushner
#42. Instead of exhausting ourselves trying to reshape the world to fit our dreams, we are better off using our strength to comfort one another in a world that is almost certain to mock our dreams and break our hearts.
Harold S. Kushner
#43. I get the feeling that people from outside the world of contemporary art see it as deserving of mockery, in an emperor's-new-clothes sort of way. I think that's not right and that it's just because they don't understand the discourse.
Rachel Kushner
#44. I love reading; it's a great way to avoid writing.
Tony Kushner
#45. 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
#46. One of the things I learned in 'Slavs!' is that it's much easier to talk about being gay than it is to talk about being a socialist. People are afraid of socialism, and plays that deal with economics are scarier to them.
Tony Kushner
#47. 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
#48. Other people may complicate our lives, but life without them would be unbearably desolate. None of us can be truly human in isolation. The qualities that make us human emerge only in the ways we relate to other people.
Harold S. Kushner
#49. 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
#50. You don't have to be religious to have a soul; everybody has one. You don't have to be religious to perfect your soul; I have found saintliness in avowed atheists.
Harold S. Kushner
#51. I find writing very difficult. It's hard and it hurts sometimes, and it's scary because of the fear of failure and the very unpleasant feeling that you may have reached the limit of your abilities.
Tony Kushner
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. '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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. You don't become happy by pursuing happiness. You become happy by living a life that means something.
Harold S. Kushner
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. The VW doesn't make you think of Hitler and genocide. It's a breast on wheels, a puffy little dream.
Rachel Kushner
#66. What cannot be achieved in one lifetime will happen when one lifetime is joined to another.
Harold S. Kushner
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. In some ways [the Internet]'s definitely an enemy.
Tony Kushner
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. In all my years of counselling those near death, I've yet to hear anyone say they wish they had spent more time at the office
Harold S. Kushner
#79. Seek something outside your nine-to-five job as an additional source of fulfillment and as a way to feel the joy of helping others.
Harold S. Kushner
#80. The only things that are really permanent are love, family, friendship, and that is a lesson. At the end of the day, that's really what it boils down to. The rest of it is just stuff.
Jared Kushner
#81. Some writers think that fiction is the space of great neutrality where all humans share the same concerns, and we are all alike. I don't think so. I'm interested in class warfare because I think it's real.
Rachel Kushner
#82. We are here to finish God's labors ... so that we could be His partners in completing the work of creation.
Harold S. Kushner
#83. You don't go to the movies to do historical research, unless it's historical research about the movies.
Tony Kushner
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#88. 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
#89. If we want to be able to pick up the pieces of our lives and go on living, we have to get over the irrational
feeling that every misfortune is our fault, the direct result of our mistakes or misbehavior. We are really not that powerful. Not everything
that happens in the world is our doin
Harold S. Kushner
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. Purple? Boy, what kind of a homosexual are you, anyway? That's not purple, Mary, that color up there is mauve.
Tony Kushner
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
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