People From Sacramento

"Power looks startlingly similar wherever you go. Power does not want you to forget that you are small and alone."

"Here’s the thing about constant surveillance—the question you must ask yourself is not “Am I being overheard?” but “Is anybody paying attention to me?”"

"He did not like Ambassador Bern’s diplomatic response. Probably he was the sort that preferred to be the only liar in the room."

"I was on the set of Tree of Life. He was with me, and he asked me [if I] would play Eleanor Rigby in his film. And I said, “Yes, but it’s so much the male perspective,” [whispers] like the majority of films that are made. I said, “I’d like to know more about the woman. I’d like to know her perspective as well.” So he went and he wrote Her. And it was very collaborative because every day as he’d write, I’d be working, and I’d come back and he’d ask me questions about sisters or whatnot and how women talk with each other, and I found that to be really exciting. … he was the full writer. I was his bounce board. Not story things, because that’s the main part of the film, but just things like, you know, cutting the hair. You know, because girls, we all tell each other, “Don’t cut your hair when you’re pregnant, don’t cut your hair when you have a breakup or when a tragedy happens.” It’s something that we like to do when we’re in an emotional place for some reason. Right? But that’s something that a man may not know, that’s inherently female. And so it was my idea, I wanted Eleanor to cut her hair off, because then it connects to then her disappearing herself as well."

"I can’t say ANYTHING. Everyone knows pretty much who I’m playing."

"A quirk of fate has put Chastain in a unique position. She is 30 now, and having worked solidly since leaving drama school with an impressive roster of A-list names, she is probably the most successful actress that no one has ever heard of. … This is about to change: over the next few months Chastain has so much coming out that she worries about being overexposed."

"I don’t want to torture anything. … it’s about trying to live a life where I’m not contributing to the cruelty in the world. … While I am on this planet, I want everyone I meet to know that I am grateful they are here."

"I’ll be the first unknown that everyone’s going to be sick of … People will say, “We have no idea what her name is, but she is everywhere!" … I did Salomé with Al Pacino, The Tree of Life with Terrence Malick, and all these films that were interesting and had great characters. But because they were so interesting, perhaps the directors had more control of them. They take their time, they’re not on a schedule."

"We saw the choices. The audience will be given the opportunity. They can see Him and Her, or they can see Them. … Well, for the cinephiles and the people who really want to commit, I would definitely say, “See Him and Her.” It’s the full experience. … I’ve always thought Him and Her. But it’s funny, in Toronto, when Harvey Weinstein saw the film for the first time, he saw Her and Him, and he was determined. He was like, “That’s how it has to be seen!” So it depends."

"Long before the #MeToo movement started, I was very upset when Jessica Chastain made statements against the film Last Tango in Paris. If you listen to her, that film should never have been made. To listen to her, Maria Schneider was raped. But Jessica Chastain wasn’t there, and it’s not true — I was on set. The scene was fiction."

"[Alicia Gavilán, to Miguel] "We are all birds in cages, but some of us find reason to sing.""

"[Henry] Life is a kind of exile and we all long to go home. Who said that?"

"[Her elderly mother, to Alicia] "Except in the novels of the Brontës, marriage is a barter. You make the best bargain you can before I die.""

"[Donati] "You see why I don't advertise I'm gay?" "No, not exactly, Nick." "Because I don't want to be confused with people like Bob." He tossed back his drink. "Drag queens, leather queens, all those sick fucks who parade around and make it impossible for the rest of us to have normal lives.""

"[Inez] "...If you consort with lowlifes you've got to expect complications.""

"[Miguel Sarmiento, to Alicia] "I do not wish to be disrespectful of your beliefs, but in my view religion is no more than superstition, a way to explain natural phenomena for which there are now rational and scientific explanations. Those superstitions may have served their purpose once, but their time has passed. The longer they persist, the more pernicious they become. ""

"The room took shape in all its squalor: clothes scattered everywhere; plates of half-finished meals; the long table used as a desk, every inch of its surface covered by moldering documents, books, and sheaves of paper bestrewn with his father's tiny script."

"[John] "You don't stop loving your kids because they fuck up," he said. "You love them more.""

"[Henry Rios] "We never know anyone as well as we think we do.""

"[Miguel Sarmiento] "The principle of all existence is cause and effect. Scientific knowledge illuminates causes so that men are not condemned to go on living ignorantly in effects.""

"[Alex] "I never knew how many ways there were to fail until I moved here.""

"Greed had always seemed to me the most self-defeating of vices, because one cannot own anything permanently: we have, at most, a life tenancy in our possessions. But I suppose the fulfilment was in the acquisition and maybe, too, someone who'd been tossed around by life needed the cosseting that money and things provide."

"[Alex] Big ideas don't pay the rent."

"[Alicia Gavilán] She had learned to distinguish between her personal thoughts and those thoughts that came to her like messages from a deeper source than her own personality. These deeper messages were sometimes consoling, but more often they had a challenging and unsettling quality. Her first impulse was always to resist them [...]. Yet as always happened, the thought simply repeated itself until she was forced to examine her reasons for rejecting it."

"[His father, to Miguel] "I know that a man's honour means nothing to your generation, but it is all that a man possesses in this life.""

"Patricia Ryan was a tall, beautiful woman about whom many stories were told, some of them true."

"[Zack Bowen] "Damn, it's tough being a fag. People hate you who don't even know you, and the ones who know you, they're worse.""

"... the usual hired guns who made up the expert witness circuit and would say basically what they were paid to say."

"[Josh Mandel] "Most things people care about are silly. They don't think about the ones that matter.""

"It really was a brutal place, Los Angeles, less a city than a collection of hostile villages united only in their mutual suspicion of each other and a susceptibility to disasters, natural and otherwise. Fires, floods, riots and earthquakes; it was looking more and more like Armageddon-by-the-Pacific."

"You want me to stipulate that the cops violated her constitutional rights?" "This is the LAPD we're talking about, Kim. It would be shocking if they hadn't violated her rights."

"[Elena] "Raising a kid is the ultimate exercise in trial and error.""

"[Donati] "You couldn't have planned a worse place to put a city than LA.""

"After he left, the three of us sat on a bench worn to the wood by all the fidgeting bottoms that had occupied it before us."

"The defined categories of heterosexual and homosexual orientation were an invention of the late nineteenth century. The notion of the "homosexual" per se is comparatively recent, an invention of the nineteenth century; the word was coined by a Hungarian doctor named Karl Maria Kertbeny, in 1869. But the classification was not a neutral one; homosexuality was not just a phenomenon, it was a pathology. This view of homosexuality - congenital but pathological - laid the groundwork for homosexuality's subsequent psychiatrization. By [the mid-twentieth century] American culture had declared war on homosexuality as if it were an epedemic. The equation of homosexuality with sickness, and heterosexuality with health, persists in popular culture. Until 1974, when the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its catalogue of mental illness, psychiatry played a long and dishonorable role in providing a basis for discrimination against gays and lesbians."

"The vendors shrilled their wares as if the lard, coal, tortillas, or candies they were selling were the last of their kind. Their cries, as they blended together, were like bird calls, as if the city were a gigantic aviary."

"[Henry, to Elena, about Angel] "Remember when Edith called him an invulnerable? I've figured out that what that means isn't that things don't hurt him, but that they don't stop him.""

"The price you must pay for the enjoyment of your own liberty is the recognition that other people, especially people with whom you may not like to identify, have an equal claim to the same liberty. America requires an allegiance to the stern principle of liberty. This is the reason gay rights matter to Americans generally and not just to lesbians and gay men. Liberty, unlike nationality, cannot be safely restricted. Restriction turns liberty into privilege, and no American's freedom is safe if individual liberty changes from a right rooted in nature to a privilege rooted in custom."

"This argument is not about sexual practices or particular lifestyles. It hinges on whether gay and lesbian Americans are entitled to the same enjoyment as their fellow citizens of the freedom to make choices about how to live their lives without suffering discrimination in consequence."

"The common experience of being gay is deeply individual. You discover your sexual identity yourself, your closet is your own, your coming out is individual. Coming out represents a decision to transform one's life from the inside out, choosing the natural over the conventional at great personal cost. The process of coming out is harrowing, but it can leave in its wake an unshakable core of certainty of self. Coming out is more than an acknowledgement, acceptance, or even announcement of one's sexual identity. It represents a continuing process founded on an act of compassion towards oneself - a compassion, alas, seldom shown by one's own family or friends, let alone society. That act is the acceptance of one's fundamental worth, including, and not despite, one's homosexuality, in the face of social condemnation and likely persecution. Coming out is the process through which one arrives at one's values the hard way, testing them against what one knows to be true about oneself. Gay men and lesbians must think about family, morality, nature, choice, freedom, and responsibility in ways most people never have to. Truly to come out, a gay person must become one of those human beings who, as psychiatrist Alice Miller writes, "wants to be true to themselves". Each gay man and woman has to come to terms with his or her homosexuality, decide whether to accept it, deny it, or try to change it, and face the consequences of the choice."

"We must also again emphasize that gays and lesbians do not seek the right to be homosexual. This "right" is not one within the authority of government to give. They are fighting for the right to secure the conditions under which they may lead ordinary, civilized lives."

"In my father's house are many dwellings. Is that what Jesus had meant? Was he speaking not only of heaven but of this life in which each person carved out of the vast, unified reality of existence the little houses of personality they inhabited? She had a vision of children making sand houses at the edge of the sea and of waves gently spilling over and eradicating them. The little sand houses were like the houses of self, and the waves were the fingers of God drawing the sand back into himself."

"This is my life, I thought, these are the people among whom I have spent it, prostitutes, tattooed boys with dead eyes, and horny cops."

"[Alicia] "What is false does not become true simply because people shout it. What is right does not change because it is inconvenient.""

"[Henry Rios] I said a prayer, always the same prayer. Two words. Help us."

"It was sometimes easier to read the future from the entrails of a cat than get a fix on what a judge was thinking, and Torres-Jones was particularly hard to get a handle on."

"The Abbey was on Robertson, just below Santa Monica, on the edge of Boys' Town. Low brick buildings housed cafes, clothing stores, coffee houses and watch repair shops that rubbed elbows with gay clubs and sex shops. These establishments catered to hordes of the beautiful young gay men who lived in the big apartment complexes that lined the side streets or who drove in from all over Southern California on weekend nights. I seldom ventured there, because it reminded me of San Francisco in the '70s, when I was a boy just coming out and how out of place I'd felt among the big-muscled boys who cruised each other with cold assessment. Twenty years later, only the faces and the clothes had changed; the air was still charged with the brutal calculation of lust. And beneath that was the claustrophobia of a ghetto, of fearful people looking out at the world from behind invisible fences."

"I had formed my stereotype of evangelists from channel-surfing through the Sunday morning religious shows: white Southern men in expensive suits, with brittle, poufy hair and faces slimed theatrically with tears as they condemned people like me to the crude hells they constructed out of ignorance and fear. Sometimes the face was black, and instead of tears was frowning sternness, but the condemnation was always the same and it was animated by that purposeful energy of hatred. I expected Ortega to be the same kind of shrieker and weeper, and assumed the best I could hope for was that Leviticus was not this week's text."

"[Henry Rios] I went down to my car, got in and sat, waiting for something to happen, some tidal wave of grief or anger to overwhelm me, but all I felt was a kind of dazed fatigue. It was the mental emptiness of effort I used to feel when I was a distance runner on my high school track team, and everything got reduced to putting one foot in front of the other. What was I then, fifteen, sixteen, pounding the dirt path along the river that ran through my home town? I sought refuge in that emptiness from my first awareness that I was different from other boys. What had Chris told me about his own adolescence, that he didn't want to be different? I didn't, either. I watched my classmates being initiated into the world of men and women where everything was planned and the outcomes known: marriage, children, family. That world was closed to me. I didn't have a plan, didn't know where I would end up or with whom. So I ran, mile after mile, until my body ached and my mind went blank. What happened is that I realised I could not outrun this thing. I remember that day, staggering along the path after a stupendous effort, darkness falling in the summer sky, racked with the dry heaves, gasping "I'm a queer," the only word I knew for my condition. I was full of fear and I felt completely alone, but I could not deny the truth and there was a kind of relief in that. I had now reached the same point with Josh's disease. I couldn't outrun it."

"[Henry, to Tony Earl] "I'll argue self-defense." "You do that," he said, "but last time I looked at the jury instructions on self-defense, if someone comes at you with fists you don't get to blow their brains out with a semiautomatic." "You can if his fists can kill you," I said."