The Glass Menagerie Quotes

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

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

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

“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

“The scene is memory and is therefore nonrealistic. 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 predominantly in the heart.”
― Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

“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, The Glass Menagerie

“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

“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

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

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

“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

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

“Being disappointed is one thing and being discouraged is something else. I am disappointed but I am not discouraged.”
― Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

“People go to the movies instead of moving.”
― Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

“attempting to find in motion what was lost in space.”
― Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

“Why, man alive, Laura! Just look about you a little. What do you see? A world full of common people! All of 'em born and all of em' going to die! Which of them has one-tenth of your good points! Or mine! Or anyone else's, as far as that goes - gosh! Everybody excels in some one thing. Some in many!”
― Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

“People are not so dreadful when you know them. That's what you have to remember! And everybody has problems, not just you, but practically everybody has got some problems. You think of yourself as having the only problems, as being the only one who is disappointed. But just look around you and you will see lots of people as disappointed as you are.”
― Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

“But here there was only hot swing music and liquor, dance halls, ban, and movies, and sex that hung in the gloom like a chandelier and flooded the world with brief, deceptive rainbows.”
― Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

“I know all about the tyranny of women.”
― Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

“To begin with, I turn back time. I reverse it to that quaint period, the thirties, when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had failed them, or they had failed their eyes, and so they were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy.”
― Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

“Jim lights a cigarette and leans indolently back on his elbow smiling at Laura with a warmth and charm which lights her inwardly with altar candles.”
― Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

“Being disappointed is one thing and being discouraged is something else.”
― Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

“People go to the movies instead of moving. Hollywood characters are supposed to have all the adventures for everybody in America, while everybody in America sits in a dark room and watches them have them.”
― Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie