Summer and Smoke Quotes

“You'll be surprised how infinitely merciful they [these tablets] are. The prescription number is 96814. I think of it as the telephone number of God!”
― Tennessee Williams, Summer and Smoke

“The girl who said 'no' — she doesn't exist anymore, she died last summer — suffocated in smoke from something on fire inside her.”
― Tennessee Williams, Summer and Smoke

“Why didn't it happen between us? Why did I fail? Why did you come close enough...and not closer?”
― Tennessee Williams, Summer and Smoke

“Life is such a mysteriously complicated thing that no one should really presume to judge and condemn the behavior of anyone else.”
― Tennessee Williams, Summer and Smoke

“Oh, I suppose I am sick, one of those weak and divided people who slip like shadows among you solid strong ones. But sometimes, out of necessity, we shadowy people take on a strength of our own.”
― Tennessee Williams, Summer and Smoke

“The night at the Casino—I wouldn’t have made love to you. Even if you had consented to go upstairs. I couldn’t have made love to you. Yes, yes! Isn’t that funny? I’m more afraid of your soul than you’re afraid of my body. You’d have been as safe as the angel of the fountain—because I wouldn’t feel decent enough—to touch you.…”
― Tennessee Williams, Summer and Smoke

“That’s your mistake. You think you’re stuffed with rose leaves? Turn around and look at it, it may do you good!... Now listen here to the anatomy lecture! This upper story’s the brain, which is hungry for something called truth and doesn’t get much but keeps on feeling hungry! This middle’s the belly which is hungry for food. This part down here is the sex which is hungry for love because it is sometimes lonesome. I’ve fed all three, as much of all three as I could, or as much as I wanted.—You’ve fed none—nothing. Well—maybe your belly a little—watery subsistence—but love or truth, nothing but—nothing but hand-me-down notions!—attitudes—poses! Now you can go.”
― Tennessee Williams, Summer and Smoke

“Some time I’d like to show you a chart of the human anatomy that I have in the office. It shows what our insides are like, and maybe you can show me where the beautiful soul is located on the chart.”
― Tennessee Williams, Summer and Smoke

“I will answer that question by asking you one.—Have you ever seen, or looked at, a picture of a Gothic cathedral?... How everything reaches up, how everything seems to be straining for something out of the reach of stone—or human—fingers?—The immense stained windows, the great arched doors that are five or six times the height of the tallest man—the vaulted ceiling and all the delicate spires—all reaching up to something beyond attainment! To me—well, that is the secret, the principle back of existence—the everlasting struggle and aspiration for more than our human limits have placed in our reach.—Who was it that said that—oh, so beautiful a thing!—“All of us are in the gutter”—but some of us are looking at the stars!”
― Tennessee Williams, Summer and Smoke

“One day will come after another and one night will come after another till sooner or later the summer will be all through with, and then it will be fall, and you will be saying, I don’t see how I’m going to get through the fall.”
― Tennessee Williams, Summer and Smoke

“Life is full of little mercies like that, not big mercies but comfortable little mercies. And so we go on…”
― Tennessee Williams, Summer and Smoke

“You—white-blooded spinster! You so right people, pious pompous mumblers, preachers and preacher’s daughter, all muffled up in a lot of worn-out magic! And I was supposed to minister to your neurosis, give you tablets for sleeping and tonics to give you the strength to go on mumbling your worn-out mumbo-jumbo!”
― Tennessee Williams, Summer and Smoke

“Sometimes it takes a tragedy like this to make a weak person strong.”
― Tennessee Williams, Summer and Smoke

“It may strike you as unpleasant. But it does have a good deal to do with— connubial felicity, as you’d call it. There are some women that just give in to a man as a sort of obligation imposed on them by the—cruelty of nature! And there you are.”
― Tennessee Williams, Summer and Smoke

“I’m beginning to feel almost like a water lily. A water lily on a Chinese lagoon.”
― Tennessee Williams, Summer and Smoke

“I don’t like meetings. The only meetings I like are between two people.”
― Tennessee Williams, Summer and Smoke

“Oh, you know, and I know, I never had any voice. I had a crush on you, though. Those were the days when I had crushes on girls. Those days are all over— now I have crushes on boys.”
― Tennessee Williams, Summer and Smoke

“Oh, I’m not mad, I’m just mystified and amazed as I always am by unprovoked malice in people.”
― Tennessee Williams, Summer and Smoke