Tennessee Williams > Quotes

“Time is the longest distance between two places.”
― Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

“Kill all my demons, and my angels might die too.”
― Tennessee Williams

“Time doesn't take away from friendship, nor does separation.”
― Tennessee Williams

“A prayer for the wild at heart kept in cages.”
― Tennessee Williams

“There's a time for departure even when there's no certain place to go.”
― Tennessee Williams

“How beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken.”
― Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

“I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person. But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people really.
”
― Tennessee Williams

“I don't want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don't tell the truth, I tell what ought to be the truth. And it that's sinful, then let me be damned for it!”
― Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire

“When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone”
― Tennessee Williams

“Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.”
― Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

“Life is partly what we make it, and partly what it is made by the friends we choose.”
― Tennessee Williams

“Don't you just love those long rainy afternoons in New Orleans when an hour isn't just an hour - but a little piece of eternity dropped into your hands - and who knows what to do with it?”
― Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire

“I've always depended on the kindness of strangers.”
― Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire

“Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.”
― Tennessee Williams

“You said, 'They’re harmless dreamers and they’re loved by the people.' 'What,' I asked you, 'is harmless about a dreamer, and what,' I asked you, 'is harmless about the love of the people? Revolution only needs good dreamers who remember their dreams.”
― Tennessee Williams

“We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it.”
― Tennessee Williams

“In memory, everything seems to happen to music.”
― Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

“There are no 'good' or 'bad' people. Some are a little better or a little worse, but all are activated more by misunderstanding than malice. A blindness to what is going on in each other's hearts... nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own egos. That is the way we all see ...each other in life. Vanity, fear, desire, competition-- all such distortions within our own egos-- condition our vision of those in relation to us. Add to those distortions to our own egos the corresponding distortions in the egos of others, and you see how cloudy the glass must become through which we look at each other. That's how it is in all living relationships except when there is that rare case of two people who love intensely enough to burn through all those layer of opacity and see each other's naked hearts. Such cases seem purely theoretical to me...”
― Tennessee Williams

“There comes a time when you look into the mirror and you realize that what you see is all that you will ever be. And then you accept it. Or you kill yourself. Or you stop looking in mirrors.”
― Tennessee Williams

“All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.”
― Tennessee Williams

“You can be young without money, but you can't be old without it.”
― Tennessee Williams

“The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.”
― Tennessee Williams

“Make voyages. Attempt them. There's nothing else.”
― Tennessee Williams

“Deliberate cruelty is unforgivable.

--Blanche Dubois”
― Tennessee Williams, Viva Modern Interpretations A Streetcar Named Desire

“We're all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.”
― Tennessee Williams

“I think that hate is a feeling that can only exist where there is no understanding.”
― Tennessee Williams, Sweet Bird of Youth

“The scene is memory and is therefore nonrealistc. Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantely in the heart.”
― Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

“Success and failure are equally disastrous.”
― Tennessee Williams

“I think no more than a week after I started writing I ran into the first block. It's hard to describe it in a way that will be understandable to anyone who is not a neurotic. I will try. All my life I have been haunted by the obsession that to desire a thing or to love a thing intensely is to place yourself in a vulnerable position, to be a possible, if not a probable, loser of what you most want. Let's leave it like that. That block has always been there and always will be, and my chance of getting, or achieving, anything that I long for will always be gravely reduced by the interminable existence of that block.”
― Tennessee Williams

“Every time you come in yelling that God damn "Rise and Shine!" "Rise and Shine!" I say to myself, "How lucky dead people are!”
― Tennessee Williams

“Some things are not forgiveable. Deliberate cruelty is not forgiveable. It is the most unforgiveable thing in my opinion, and the one thing in which I have never, ever been guilty.”
― Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire

“All pretty girls are a trap, a pretty trap, and men expect them to be.”
― Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

“What on earth can you do on this earth but catch at whatever comes near you, with both your fingers, until your fingers are broken?”
― Tennessee Williams, Orpheus Descending

“We are all civilized people, wich means that we are all savages at heart but observing a few amenities of civilized behaviour.”
― Tennessee Williams

“Life is an unanswered question, but let's still believe in the dignity and importance of the question.”
― Tennessee Williams

“Say a prayer for the wild at heart kept in cages”
― Tennessee Williams

“You are the only young man that I know of who ignores the fact that the future becomes the present, the present the past, and the past turns into everlasting regret if you don't plan for it.”
― Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

“I don't want realism. I want magic!”
― Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire

“For nowadays the world is lit by lightning! Blow out your candles, Laura -- and so goodbye. . . .”
― Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

“Physical beauty is passing - a transitory possession - but beauty of the mind, richness of the spirit, tenderness of the heart - I have all these things - aren't taken away but grow! Increase with the years!”
― Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire

“I didn't go to the moon, I went much further—for time is the longest distance between two places”
― Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

“Mendacity is a system that we live in," declares Brick. "Liquor is one way out an'death's the other.”
― Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

“What is the victory of a cat on a hot tin roof?—I wish I knew... Just staying on it, I guess, as long as she can...”
― Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

“The cities swept about me like dead leaves, leaves that were brightly colored but torn away from the branches. I would have stopped, but I was pursued by something. It always came upon me unawares, taking me altogether by surprise. Perhaps it was a familiar bit of music. Perhaps it was only a piece of transparent glass.”
― Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

“Then what is good? The obsessive interest in human affairs, plus a certain amount of compassion and moral conviction, that first made the experience of living something that must be translated into pigment or music or bodily movement or poetry or prose or anything that's dynamic and expressivee--that's what's good for you if you're at all serious in your aims. William Saroyan wrote a great play on this theme, that purity of heart is the one success worth having. "In the time of your life--live!" That time is short and it doesn't return again. It is slipping away while I write this and while you read it, the monosyllable of the clock is Loss, loss, loss, unless you devote your heart to its opposition.”
― Tennessee Williams

“A high station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace.”
― Tennessee Williams

“I cannot write any sort of story unless there is at least one character in it for whom I have physical desire.”
― Tennessee Williams

“The Venus flytrap, a devouring organism, aptly named for the goddess of love.”
― Tennessee Williams, Suddenly Last Summer

“The rest of my days I'm going to spend on the sea. And when I die, I'm going to die on the sea. You know what I shall die of? I shall die of eating an unwashed grape. One day out on the ocean I will die--with my hand in the hand of some nice looking ship's doctor, a very young one with a small blond moustache and a big silver watch. "Poor lady," they'll say, "The quinine did her no good. That unwashed grape has transported her soul to heaven.”
― Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire

“Go, then! Go to the moon-you selfish dreamer!”
― Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie