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Lear Quotes

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Lear Quotes

“Let the preacher tell the truth. Let him make audible the silence of the news of the world with the sound turned off so that in the silence we can hear the tragic truth of the Gospel, which is that the world where God is absent is a dark and echoing emptiness; and the comic truth of the Gospel, which is that it is into the depths of his absence that God makes himself present in such unlikely ways and to such unlikely people that old Sarah and Abraham and maybe when the time comes even Pilate and Job and Lear and Henry Ward Beecher and you and I laugh till the tears run down our cheeks. And finally let him preach this overwhelming of tragedy by comedy, of darkness by light, of the ordinary by the extraordinary, as the tale that is too good not to be true because to dismiss it as untrue is to dismiss along with it that catch of the breath, that beat and lifting of the heart near to or even accompanied by tears, which I believe is the deepest intuition of truth that we have.”

“Any idiot would know women's needs are simple. All we want is your basic millionaire brain surgeon criminal lawyer great dancer who pilots his own Lear Jet and owns seafront property. On the other hand, things being what they are today, most of us will settle for a guy who holds down a steady job and isn't carrying an infectious disease.”

“All's well that ends well.”

“We become lovers when we see Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet makes us students. The blood of Duncan is upon our hands, with Timon werage against the world, and when Lear wanders out upon the heath the terror of madness touches us. Ours is the white sinlessness of Desdemona, and ours, also, the sin of Iago.”

“Whatever else the religious Right may be, it is a bonanza for its opponents... Reports of the great terror that is upon us are raising millions of dollars in fund appeals by Planned Parenthood, the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Organization for Women, Norman Lear's People for the American Way, and others who claim to believe that the religious Right is the greatest peril to American democracy since Joe McCarthy.”

“Shakespeare carries us to such a lofty strain of intelligent activity, as to suggest a wealth which beggars his own; and we then feel that the splendid works which he has created, and which in other hours we extol as a sort of self-existent poetry, take no stronger hold of real nature than the shadow of a passing traveller on the rock. The inspiration which uttered itself in Hamlet and Lear could utter things as good from day to day, for ever.”

“Theater roles are written by the great masters. The greatest literature that you can possibly know are the theater roles like King Lear, Hamlet, and all of those great roles. So all you do is you dive into these unchallenged roles and see how far you can get, what kind of accolades you can get, and how good you can be in them. In movie roles, you can actually improve them by knowing a lot about your own stage technique, which helps a great deal in the cinema and how you can project inner humor even though the particular dialogue is not necessarily funny, but you can infuse it with humor.”

“I walk into office, which is the casting office for CBS in New York. Mainly what they cast out of this office was the CBS daytime shows. I go in and walk into this room which every seat is filled with young African-American boys and girls and they were in their teens. I went, "I'm in the wrong place. Why am I here? What's going on?"So I go in and meet Norman [Lear].”

“After we did [All In The Family], that ended up being a real love fest all around. Me and Norman, Norman [Lear] and me, Rob Reiner, everybody liked everybody. So about six or seven months later I moved out to L.A. and I got a call that Norman wanted to see me. I came in and he said "ABC has given me a property that they just optioned to make into a TV series. It's from a play called Hot L Baltimore, and I want you to be in it."”

“I was in King Lear with Sir Tom Courtenay at The Royal Exchange in Manchester. In fact, that's where I met my husband. I was playing Regan and he was playing Cornwall and together we fell in love plucking out Gloucester's eyes. It was great fun. Everyone assumes that I was Cordelia because I've got blonde hair but I was Regan and they gave me a long auburn wig. It was great, good fun.”

“Novels are routinely denigrated when characters are not found to be likable. Is Raskolnikov likable? Is King Lear? The plethora of such naive readers testifies to a failure of imagination - the capacity to see into unfamiliar lives, motives, feelings - and this failure must, at least in part, be the failure of the teaching of literature in the schools.”

“In my school, the library was forbidden. I was accused of turning on the radiator so that the [class]room was uninhabitable and the ceiling came down below; I'm pretty sure I didn't do it. But then we were moved to the library. And there was a really boring history thing, about the Spanish Armada: how could you make that boring?!So I reached my hand out, and slid a book off to read under the desk, and it opened at King Lear Act Four Scene Six. I was astounded. I'd never seen language like it. I was awestruck. I think that may be one reason why I got involved in theatre.”

“The only acceptable way to solve ecological problems is if you can persuade people to have fewer children. In the Victorian times, there were families of 15 children. Someone like Edward Lear, he was the last of 21 children. And so what we have to think about is offering people the alternative choice. And in the West, that's what's happening. The birth rate has been dropping steadily and still is. I'm wanting human beings to be better off so they don't view children as an insurance for the future.”

“Michael Moore's first big film "Roger & Me" has an extremely powerful scene in which a family in Flint, Michigan is evicted right around Christmas. That was an inspiration to me to document the stories of people living on the edge as they're happening. My aim in "A House Divided" was to explore the urgent challenges of housing inequity in New York through the eyes of Norman Lear.”

“Housing in New York seemed to fit Norman Lear. In addition, his shows confronted all kinds of social issues - racial separation and prejudice being foremost among them. The Evans of Good Times were the first black family to be the focus of a primetime American TV show. A lot of the people we came across in filming were familiar with the role Norman played in catalyzing important national conversations about race. They seemed grateful to him for trying to move the needle.”