Asch Fields > Asch's Quotes

“I've got the guts to die. What I want to know is, have you got the guts to live?”
― Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

“What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it's curved like a road through mountains.”
― Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire

“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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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

“Has it ever struck you that life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quick you hardly catch it going?”
― Tennessee Williams, The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore

“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

“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

“Show me a person who hasn´t known any sorrow and I´ll show you a superficial.”
― Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire

“The world is violent and mercurial--it will have its way with you. We are saved only by love--love for each other and the love that we pour into the art we feel compelled to share: being a parent; being a writer; being a painter; being a friend. We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.”
― Tennessee Williams

“Friends are God's way of apologizing to us for our families”
― 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

“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

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

“Don't look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you'll know you're dead.”
― Tennessee Williams

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

“I don't believe in "original sin." I don't believe in "guilt." I don't believe in villains or heroes - only right or wrong ways that individuals have taken, not by choice but by necessity or by certain still-uncomprehended influences in themselves, their circumstances, and their antecedents.
This is so simple I'm ashamed to say it, but I'm sure it's true. In fact, I would bet my life on it! And that's why I don't understand why our propaganda machines are always trying to teach us, to persuade us, to hate and fear other people on the same little world that we live in.”
― Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire

“Oh, you weak, beautiful people who give up with such grace. What you need is someone to take hold of you--gently, with love, and hand your life back to you, like something gold you let go of--and I can! I'm determined to do it--and nothing's more determined than a cat on a tin roof--is there?”
― Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

“The future is called "perhaps", which is the only possible thing to call the future. And the only important thing is not to allow that to scare you.”
― Tennessee Williams, Orpheus Descending

“Hell is yourself and the only redemption is when a person puts himself aside to feel deeply for another person.”
― Tennessee Williams

“I want to infect you with the tremendous excitement of living, because I believe that you have the strength to bear it.”
― Tennessee Williams, The Selected Letters, Vol. 1: 1920-1945

“I don't believe anyone ever suspects how completely unsure I am of my work and myself and what tortures of self-doubting the doubt of others has always given me.”
― Tennessee Williams

“The trouble with this world is that everybody has to compromise and conform.”
― Tennessee Williams