serafina20 | Angels in America: The Millennium Approaches

I feel today should be a national holiday. So, my favorite parts from Part 1:

Rabbi Isidor Chemelwitz: (during his monologue that opens the play) ...not a person but a whole kind of person, the ones who crossed the ocean, who brought with us to America the villages for Russia and Lithuania--and how we struggled, and how we fought, for the family, for the Jewish home, so that you would not grow up here, in this strange place, the melting pot where nothing melted

Act 1, Scene 3

Harper: I'd like to go traveling. Leave you behind to worry. I'll send postcards with strange stamps and tantalizing messages on the back. "Later maybe." "Nevermore . . ."

Act 1, Scene 5

Rabbi Isidor Chemelwithz: Catholics believe in forgiveness. Jews believe in Guilt.

Harper: I heard on the radio how to give a blowjob.
Joe: What?
Harper: You want to try.
Joe: You really shouldn't listen to stuff like that.
Harper: Mormons can give blowjobs.

Act 1, Scene 7 (honestly, my favorite quote from the whole play. I used to listen to Prior deliver it with my ear pressed against the door to the theater as I waited for my cue in my own play, which was Blithe Spirit. I must have heard it about 7 times and melted each time)

Prior: One wants to move through life with elegance and grace, blossoming infrequently but with exquisite taste, and perfect timing, like a rare bloom, a zebra orchid ... One wants ... But one so seldom gets what one wants, does one? No. One does not. One gets fucked. Over. One ... dies at thirty, robbed of ... decades of majesty.

Same scene

Harper: It's terrible. Mormons are not supposed to be addicted to anything. I'm a Mormon.
Prior: I'm a homosexual
Harper: Oh! In my church we don't believe in homosexuals.
Prior: In my church we don't believe in Mormons.

Same scene

Harper: Do homos take, like, lots of long walks?
Prior: Yes. We do. In stretch pants with lavender coifs.

Same scene

Prior: I usually said, "Fuck the truth," but, mostly, the truth fucks you.

Act 1, Scene 9
(finally, a Roy quote! I love Roy Cohn's character. It almost makes me wish I were a man so I could play it).

Roy: Your problem, Henry, is that you are hung up on words, on labels, that you believe they mean what they seem to mean. AIDS. Homosexual. Gay. Lesbian. You think these are names that tell you who someone sleep with, but they don't tell you that.

Henry: No?

Roy: No. Like all labels they tell you one thing and one thing only: where does an individual so identified fit in the food chain, in the pecking order. Not ideology, or sexual taste, but something much simpler: clout. Not who I fuck or who fucks me, but who will pick up the phone when I call, who owes me favors. That is what a label refers to.

Same scene

Roy: Because what I am is defined by entirely who I am. Roy Cohn is not a homosexual. Roy Cohn is a heterosexual man, Henry, who fucks around with guys.

Act 2, Scene 4

(fits Lionel's perspective on life beautifully)
Roy: Sometimes a father's love has to be very, very hard, unfair even, cold to makes his son grow strong in a world like this. This isn't a good world.

Act 2, Scene 6

(and this fits me very well)
Martin: It's the fear of what comes after the doing that makes the doing hard to do.

Act 2, Scene 7

Joe: It's kind of terrifying
Louis: Yeah, well, freedom is. Heartless, too.

Act 3, Scene 3
Louis: ... what I think is that what AIDS shows us is the limits of tolerance, that it's not enough to be tolerated, because when the shit hits the fan you find out how much tolerance is worth. Nothing. And underneath all the tolerance is intense, passionate hatred.

Perestrokia quotes next week.