Top 100 Quotes About Tennessee Williams
#1. Laws of silence don't work ... . When something is festering in your memory or your imagination, laws of silence don't work, it's just like shutting a door and locking it on a house on fire in hope of forgetting that the house is burning. But not facing a fire doesn't put it out.
Tennessee Williams
#2. The Venus flytrap, a devouring organism, aptly named for the goddess of love.
Tennessee Williams
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. Maggie, we're through with lies and liars in this house. Lock the door.
Tennessee Williams
#7. 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.
Tennessee Williams
#8. Youth must be wanton, youth must be quick, Dance to the candle while lasteth the wick.
Tennessee Williams
#9. Walls are built up between people a hell of a damn sight faster than
broken down.
Tennessee Williams
#10. 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
#11. The tricky or boastful gods of ancient myths and primitive folk tales are characters of the same kind that turn up in Faulkner or Tennessee Williams.
Northrop Frye
#12. 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.
Tennessee Williams
#13. Why, you're not crippled, you just have a little defect - hardly noticeable, even! When people have some slight disadvantage like that, they cultivate other things to make up for it - develop charm - and vivacity - and - charm!
Tennessee Williams
#14. Look at Picasso. O'Neill. Tennessee Williams. Capote. Were these shiny happy people spreading sunshine? No. Only the greatest of personal demons can force you to do powerful work.
Marisha Pessl
#15. As for me, no one will ever love me. But you could get used to me, couldn't you, Jimmy?
Tennessee Williams
#17. To change is to live, to live is to change, and not to change is to die.
Tennessee Williams
#18. 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
#19. Tennessee Williams recognized that great theater begins with great talkers, and that great talkers obey two rules: they never sound like anyone else and they never say anything directly.
Edmund White
#20. Savannah is a ... lovely pastel dream of tight cobbled streets ... There are legendary scenes ... to rival any dreamed up by Tennessee Williams.
Rosemary Daniell
#22. 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
#23. I respect a person that has had to fight and howl for his decency.
Tennessee Williams
#26. 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
#27. All of us are guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.
Tennessee Williams
#28. There's a time for departure even when there's no certain place to go.
Tennessee Williams
#29. That Europe is nothin' on earth but a great big auction, that's all it is, that bunch of old worn-out places, it's just a big fire-sale, the whole rutten thing.
Tennessee Williams
#32. I don't think a married couple can go through life without laughs together any more than they can without tears.
Tennessee Williams
#33. Somebody said once or wrote, once: 'We're all of us children in a vast kindergarten trying to spell God's name with the wrong alphabet blocks!
Tennessee Williams
#35. Morning can always be counted on to bring us back to a more realistic level.
Tennessee Williams
#36. There is only one true aristocracy ... and that is the aristocracy of passionate souls!
Tennessee Williams
#38. Is a lifetime long enough to hold the regret that I have for that fantastically aborted but crazily sweet love affair?
Tennessee Williams
#39. It would be one of those evenings when lady luck showed the bitchy streak in her nature
Tennessee Williams
#41. 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
#42. When I write I don't aim to shock people, and I'm surprised when I do. But I don't think that anything that occurs in life should be omitted from art, though the artist should present it in a fashion that is artistic and not ugly. I set out to tell the truth. And sometimes the truth is shocking.
Tennessee Williams
#44. Tennessee Williams was a gifted talker with a beautiful accent and we had lots of things in common.
Gloria Swanson
#45. I can't stand a naked light bulb, any more than I can a rude remark or a vulgar action.
Tennessee Williams
#47. The work of a writer, his continuing work, depends for breath of life on a certain privacy of heart.
Tennessee Williams
#48. Come on, indulge yourself. You got nothing to lose that won't be lost.
Tennessee Williams
#49. [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
#51. He always entered the house as though he were entering it with the intention of tearing it down from inside
Tennessee Williams
#53. 'The Glass Menagerie' by Tennessee Williams is a great play. I had to read it for school when I was younger, but I started writing scripts after that. That's what got me into writing.
Jake T. Austin
#55. And in the spring, it's touching to notice them making their first discovery of love! As if nobody had ever known it before!
Tennessee Williams
#56. It is almost as if you were frantically constructing another world while the world that you live in dissolves beneath your feet, and that your survival depends on completing this construction at least one second before the old habitation collapses.
Tennessee Williams
#57. 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
#58. I soon found myself becoming indifferent to people. A well cynicism rose in me. Conversations all sounded as if they had been recorded years ago and were being played back on a turntable.
Tennessee Williams
#59. At the age of fourteen I discovered writing as an escape from a world of reality in which I felt acutely uncomfortable.
Tennessee Williams
#60. Animals have sections in their stomachs which enable them to digest food without mastication, but human beings are supposed to chew their food before they swallow it down ... So chew your food and give your salivary glands a chance to function!
Tennessee Williams
#61. The theatre is a place where one has time for the problems of people to whom one would show the door if they came to one's office for a job.
Tennessee Williams
#62. Only animals have to satisfy instincts! Surely your aims are somewhat higher than theirs! Than monkeys! Pigs!
Tennessee Williams
#63. There's no better credit card in the world than driving up at a bank door in a Cadillac limousine.
Tennessee Williams
#64. Life is such a mysteriously complicated thing that no one should really presume to judge and condemn the behavior of anyone else.
Tennessee Williams
#66. Something in me will save me from utter ruin no matter what comes.
Tennessee Williams
#67. 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
#68. Life is an unanswered question, but let's still believe in the dignity and importance of the question.
Tennessee Williams
#69. It is planned speeches that contain lies or dissimulations, not what you blurt out so spontaneously in one instant.
Tennessee Williams
#71. I felt a great depression, probably because I never believed that anything would continue, would hold. I never thought my advance would maintain its ground. I always thought there would be a collapse immediately after the advance.
Tennessee Williams
#72. What's that smell in this room? Didn't you notice it, Brick? Didn't you notice a powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity in this room? There ain't nothin' more powerful than the odor of mendacity. You can smell it. It smells like death.
- Big Daddy
Tennessee Williams
#74. I'm not good. I don't know why people have to pretend to be good, nobody's good.
Tennessee Williams
#75. We are all civilized people, wich means that we are all savages at heart but observing a few amenities of civilized behaviour.
Tennessee Williams
#76. I know I fib a good deal. After all, a woman's charm is fifty per cent illusion, but when a thing is important I tell the truth.
- Blanche Scene II
Tennessee Williams
#78. 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
#79. Margaret: Oh you weak people, you weak, beautiful people! - who give up. What you want is someone to [she turns out the rose-silk lamp] take hold of you. Gently, gently, with love! And I do love you, Brick, I do!
Brick [smiling with charming sadness]: Wouldn't it be funny if that was true?
Tennessee Williams
#80. The most dangerous word in any human tongue is the word for brother. It's inflammatory.
Tennessee Williams
#81. All pretty girls are a trap, a pretty trap, and men expect them to be.
Tennessee Williams
#82. The object of art is to make eternal the desperately fleeting moment.
Tennessee Williams
#83. 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
#86. 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
#90. I'm not really so hard & cynical after all - in fact I'm still dangerously soft.
Tennessee Williams
#91. We're left alone with each other. We have to creep close to each other and give gentle little nudges with our paws and our muzzles before we can slip into sleep and rest for the next day's playtime.
Tennessee Williams
#92. Openings come quickly, sometimes, like blue space in running clouds. A complete overcast, then a blaze of light ...
Tennessee Williams
#95. Everyone says he's sincere, but everyone isn't sincere. If everyone was sincere who says he's sincere there wouldn't be half so many insincere ones in the world and there would be lots, lots, lots more really sincere ones!
Tennessee Williams
#96. One man has one great true thing in his life. One great good thing that is true!
Tennessee Williams
#98. I believe that the silence of God, the absolute speechlessness of Him is a long, long and awful thing that the whole world is lost because of.
Tennessee Williams
#99. 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
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