Top 100 Tennessee Williams Quotes
#1. The Venus flytrap, a devouring organism, aptly named for the goddess of love.
Tennessee Williams
#2. Personal lyricism is the outcry of prisoner to prisoner from the cell in solitary where each is confined for the duration of his life.
Tennessee Williams
#3. 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.
Tennessee Williams
#4. In all these years, you never believed I loved you. And I did. I did so much. I did love you. I even loved your hate and your hardness.
Tennessee Williams
#5. 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
#8. 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
#9. I don't think a married couple can go through life without laughs together any more than they can without tears.
Tennessee Williams
#13. Later tonight am going to tell you that I love you and maybe by that time you will be drunk enough to believe me.
Tennessee Williams
#16. [Her delicate beauty must avoid a strong light. There is something about her uncertain manner, as well as her white clothes, that suggests a moth.]
Tennessee Williams
#18. I hope to die in my sleep, when the time comes, and I hope it will be in the beautiful big brass bed in my New Orleans apartment, the bed which is associated with so much love.
Tennessee Williams
#19. At the age of fourteen I discovered writing as an escape from a world of reality in which I felt acutely uncomfortable.
Tennessee Williams
#20. There's no better credit card in the world than driving up at a bank door in a Cadillac limousine.
Tennessee Williams
#22. You two had something that had to be kept on ice, yes, incorruptible, yes!
and death was the only icebox where you could keep it ...
Tennessee Williams
#23. Life is an unanswered question, but let's still believe in the dignity and importance of the question.
Tennessee Williams
#24. We are all civilized people, wich means that we are all savages at heart but observing a few amenities of civilized behaviour.
Tennessee Williams
#25. But there are things that happen between a man and a woman in the dark
that sort of make everything else seem
unimportant.
Tennessee Williams
#26. The most dangerous word in any human tongue is the word for brother. It's inflammatory.
Tennessee Williams
#27. All pretty girls are a trap, a pretty trap, and men expect them to be.
Tennessee Williams
#28. My only point, the only point that I'm making, is life has got to be allowed to continue even after the dream of life is
all
over ...
Tennessee Williams
#29. Monsters don't die early; they hang on long. Awfully long. Their vanity's infinite, almost as infinite as their disgust with themselves.
Tennessee Williams
#30. I'm not really so hard & cynical after all - in fact I'm still dangerously soft.
Tennessee Williams
#33. He was always running or bounding, never just walking. He seemed always at the point of defeating the law of gravity.
Tennessee Williams
#34. Some mystery should be left in the revelation of character in a play, just as a great deal of mystery is always left in the revelation of character in life, even in one's own character to himself.
Tennessee Williams
#35. It is, perhaps more than anything else, the arrest of time which has taken place in a completed work of art that gives certain plays their feeling of depth and significance.
Tennessee Williams
#36. What shouldn't you do if you're a young playwright? Don't bore the audience! I mean, even if you have to resort to totally arbitrary killing on stage, or pointless gunfire, at least it'll catch their attention and keep them awake. Just keep the thing going any way you can.
Tennessee Williams
#37. I cannot write any sort of story unless there is at least one character in it for whom I have physical desire.
Tennessee Williams
#38. When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I'm only really alive when I'm writing.
Tennessee Williams
#39. Hell is yourself and the only redemption is when a person puts himself aside to feel deeply for another person.
Tennessee Williams
#40. Unattached and aimless, these old men are always infatuated with little certainties and regularities such as those that ordered the life of Mr. Krupper as seen from outside. Habit is living. Anything unexpected reminds them of death.
("Hard Candy")
Tennessee Williams
#41. 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
#42. I have always been pushed by the negative. The apparent failure of a play sends me back to my typewriter that very night, before the reviews are out. I am more compelled to get back to work than if I had a success.
Tennessee Williams
#43. Perhaps the most vivid recollection of my youth is that of the local wheelmen, led by my father, stopping at our home to eat pone, sip mint juleps, and flog the field hands. This more than anything cultivated my life-long aversion to bicycles.
Tennessee Williams
#44. Mendacity is a system that we live in," declares Brick. "Liquor is one way out an'death's the other.
Tennessee Williams
#46. The world is a funny paper read backwards. And that way it isn't so funny.
Tennessee Williams
#47. A fragile, unearthly prettiness has come out in Laura: she is like a piece of translucent glass touched by light, given a momentary radiance, not actual, not lasting.
Tennessee Williams
#48. In human character, simplicity doesn't exist except among simpletons.
Tennessee Williams
#49. You know, then that the public Somebody you are when you 'have a name' is a fiction created with mirrors and that the only somebody worth being is the solitary and unseen you that existed from your first breath
Tennessee Williams
#50. 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
#51. I've been accused of having a death wish but I think it's life that I wish for, terribly, shamelessly, on any terms whatsoever.
Tennessee Williams
#52. I saw that it was all over, put away in a box like a doll no longer cared for, the magical intimacy of our childhood together
Tennessee Williams
#55. It's no tragedy, Freckles. Glass breaks so easily. No matter how careful you are.
Tennessee Williams
#56. I can't expose a human weakness on the stage unless I know it through having it myself.
Tennessee Williams
#58. 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
#59. Don't look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you'll know you're dead.
Tennessee Williams
#60. A high station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace.
Tennessee Williams
#61. And so tonight we're going to make the lie true, and when that's done, I'll bring the liquor back here and we'll get drunk together, here, tonight, in this place that death has come into ...
Tennessee Williams
#63. Blanche:
No, I have the misfortune of being an English instructor. I attempt to instill a bunch of bobby-soxers and drugstore Romeos with a reverence for Hawthorne and Whitman and Poe!
Tennessee Williams
#64. 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
#66. 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
#67. To you, whoever you are, when I am gone - remember to be kind tonight to some lonely person. For me.
Tennessee Williams
#68. And then the searchlight which had been turned on the world was turned off again and never for one moment since has there been any light that's stronger than this-kitchen-candle ...
Tennessee Williams
#69. He is the long-delayed but always expected something that we live for.
Tennessee Williams
#71. If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it.
Tennessee Williams
#72. Memory takes a lot of poetic licence. 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. The interior is therefore rather dim and poetic.
Tennessee Williams
#73. I wrote because I had to. I couldn't stop. There wasn't anything else I could do. If no one ever bought anything, anything I ever did, I'd still be writing. It's beyond a compulsion.
Tennessee Williams
#74. She laughs frequently and wildly and with a sort of precocious, tragic abandon.
Tennessee Williams
#75. For there was a conspiracy of dullness in the world, a universal plan to shut out the resurgences of spirit which might interfere with clockwork. Better to keep your elevation unseen until it is higher than strangers' hands can reach to pull you down to their level.
Tennessee Williams
#77. It's hard enough for me to write what I want to write without me trying to write what you say they want me to write which I don't want to write.
Tennessee Williams
#78. It's almost impossible for anybody to believe that they're not loved by someone they believe they love. But honey, I love nobody.
Tennessee Williams
#79. We lose the magic whenever we stop telling our story and begin to wonder how we're doing, if we're selling it, if the listener likes us. Just tell the story and go on to the next one. All of us are full of stories the world might want to hear.
Tennessee Williams
#80. 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
#82. I'm a poet. And then I put the poetry in the drama. I put it in short stories, and I put it in the plays. Poetry's poetry. It doesn't have to be called a poem, you know.
Tennessee Williams
#83. I have met a great many people, nearly all friendly, many of whom I was fairly intimate with in one way of another, but nobody has seemed as close to me in spirit as you are. That was why I thought only of you at those times when my life seemed in danger of falling to pieces.
Tennessee Williams
#84. The role of benefactor is worse than thankless, it's the role of a victim, Doctor, a sacrificial victim, yes, they want your blood, Doctor, they want your blood on the altar steps of their outraged, outrageous egos!
Tennessee Williams
#85. It was useless trying to explain to Cecila that poetry wasn't a commodity, that it could never be bought or sold, that it was, in fact, unteansferrable, remaining forever a part of the one who wrote it.
Tennessee Williams
#86. They told me to take a streetcar named Desire and then transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at - Elysian Fields!
Tennessee Williams
#88. Chance, you've gone past something you couldn't afford to go past; your time, your youth, you've passed it. It's all you had and you've had it.
Tennessee Williams
#89. Living with someone you love can be lonelier than living entirely alone, if the one that you love doesn't love you.
Tennessee Williams
#90. The apartment faces an alley and is entered by a fire-escape, a structure whose name is a touch of accidental poetic truth, for all of these huge buildings are always burning with the slow and implacable fires of human desperation.
Tennessee Williams
#91. I want to infect you with the tremendous excitement of living, because I believe that you have the strength to bear it.
Tennessee Williams
#92. I've got the guts to die. What I want to know is, have you got the guts to live?
Tennessee Williams
#93. This play is dedicated to the memory of Clarence Darrow, The Great Defender, whose mental frontiers were the four corners of the sky.
Tennessee Williams
#94. Well, sooner or later, at some point in your life, the thing that you lived for is lost or abandoned, and then ... you die, or find something else.
Tennessee Williams
#96. It's like a switch, clickin' off in my head. Turns the hot light off and the cool one on, and all of a sudden there's peace.
Tennessee Williams
#97. The biggest of all differences in this world is between the ones that had or have pleasure in love and those that haven't and hadn't any pleasure in love, but just watched with sick envy.
Tennessee Williams
#98. The human animal is a beast that dies but the fact that he's dying don't give him pity for others.
Tennessee Williams
#99. Life is important. There is nothing to hold onto. A man that drinks is throwing his life away. Don't do it, hold on to your life. There is nothing else to hold on to ...
Tennessee Williams
#100. If people behaved in the same way nations do they would all be put in straitjackets.
Tennessee Williams
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