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ANGELS IN AMERICA
I usually say, "Fuck the truth," but mostly, the truth fucks you. (Prior)
Prior Walter: I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.
Hannah Pitt: Well that's a stupid thing to do.
Shut up! Please stop jabbering for one minute and pull your wits together and tell me how to get to Brooklyn, because you
know and you're going to tell me because there is no one else around to tell me and I'm cold and I'm wet and I'm very, very
angry. So I'm sorry that you're psychotic but just make an effort. Pull yourself together and take a deep breath. (Hannah,
to the homeless woman)
Harper Pitt: I'm not addicted. I don't believe in addiction and I... I never drink and I never take drugs.
Prior Walter: Well, smell you, Nancy Drew.
Harper Pitt: Except for Valium.
Prior Walter: Except Valium in wee fistfuls.
Harper Pitt: It's terrible. Mormons are not supposed to be addicted to anything. I'm a Mormon.
Prior Walter: I'm a homosexual.
Harper Pitt: Oh. In my church, we don't believe in homosexuals.
Prior Walter: In my church, we don't believe in Mormons.
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. (Belize)
Roy Cohn: What's it like? After?
Belize: After...?
Roy Cohn: This misery ends?
Belize: Hell or heaven?
Roy Cohn: Heaven.
Belize: Like San Francisco.
Roy Cohn: A city. Good. I was worried... it'd be a garden. I hate that shit.
I don't understand why I'm not dead. When your heart breaks, you should die. (Harper)
Harper Pitt: What are you doing in my hallucination?
Prior Walter: I'm not in your hallucination, you're in my dream.
AIDS. Homosexual. Gay. Lesbian. You think these are names that tell you who a person sleeps with, but they don't tell you
that. No. Like all labels they tell you one thing, and one thing only: Where does an individual so identified fit into the
food chain, the pecking order? Not ideology or sexual taste, but something much simpler: clout. Not who I fuck or who fucks
me, but who will come to the phone when I call, who owes me favors. This is what a label refers to. Now to someone who does
not understand this, a homosexual is what I am because I have sex with men, but really this is wrong. A homosexual is somebody
who, in 15 years of trying cannot get a pissant anit-discrimination bill through the city council. A homosexual is somebody
who knows nobody and who nobody knows. Who has zero clout. Does this sound like me Henry? (Roy Cohn)
This disease will be the end of many of us, but not nearly all. 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. (Prior)
: But still. Still bless me anyway. I want more life. I can't help myself. I do. I've lived through such terrible times and
there are people who live through much worse. But you see them living anyway. When they're more spirit than body, more sores
than skin, when they're burned and in agony, when flies lay eggs in the corners of the eyes of their children - they live.
Death usually has to take life away. I don't know if that's just the animal. I don't know if it's not braver to die, but I
recognize the habit; the addiction to being alive. So we live past hope. If I can find hope anywhere, that's it, that's the
best I can do. It's so much not enough. It's so inadequate. But still bless me anyway. I want more life. And if he comes back,
take him to court. He walked out on us, he oughta pay. (Prior)
When you cry, Louis, it's nothing. It's just the idea of crying. (Prior)
Real love isn't ambivalent. I'd swear that's a line from my favorite best-selling paperback novel, "In Love with the Night
Mysterious", except I don't think you've ever read it. Well, you ought to, instead of spending the rest of your life, trying
to get through "Democracy in America." It's about this white woman whose daddy owns a plantation in the Deep South, in the
years before the Civil War. And her name is Margaret, and she's in love with her daddy's number-one slave, and his name is
Thaddeus. And she's married, but her white slave-owner husband has AIDS: Antebellum Insufficiently-Developed Sex-organs. And
so, there's a lot of hot stuff going down, when Margaret and Thaddeus can catch a spare torrid ten under the cotton-picking
moon. And then of course the Yankees come, and they set the slaves free. And the slaves string up old daddy and so on, historical
fiction. Somewhere in there I recall, Margaret and Thaddeus find the time to discuss the nature of love. Her face is reflecting
the flames of the burning plantation, You know the way white people do, and his black face is dark in the night and she says
to him, "Thaddeus, real love isn't ever ambivalent." (Belize)
Life is full of horror; nobody escapes, nobody; save yourself. Whatever pulls on you, whatever needs from you, threatens you.
Don't be afraid; people are so afraid; don't be afraid to live in the raw wind, naked, alone...Learn at least this: What you
are capable of. Let nothing stand in your way. (Roy Cohn)
Oh my queen; you know you've hit rock-bottom when even drag is a drag. (Prior)
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