Tennessee Williams Quotes

Luck is believing you're lucky.

In human character, simplicity doesn't exist except among simpletons.

Caged birds accept each other, but flight is what they long for.

Monsters don't die early; they hang on long. Awfully long. Their vanity's infinite, almost as infinite as their disgust with themselves.

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.

Make voyages. Attempt them. There's nothing else.

I'm not really so hard & cynical after all - in fact I'm still dangerously soft.

To be free is to have achieved your life.

I think that hate is a feeling that can only exist where there is no understanding.

She laughs frequently and wildly and with a sort of precocious, tragic abandon.

You see, baby, after a glass or two of wine I'm inclined to extravagance.

To know me is not to love me. At

All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent

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.

The world is a funny paper read backwards. And that way it isn't so funny.

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.

Success and failure are equally disastrous.

People go to the movies instead of moving.

And in the spring, it's touching to notice them making their first discovery of love! As if nobody had ever known it before!

We mustn't scream at each other, the walls in this house have ears ...

Since that day, when people have spoken to me of "genius", I have felt the inside pocket to make sure my wallet's still there.

Kill off all my demons and my angels might die too.

Once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle, you are equipped with the basic means of salvation.

Sometimes - there's God - so quickly!

There's a time for departure even when there's no certain place to go.

Things have a way of turning out so badly.

I respect a person that has had to fight and howl for his decency.

Personal lyricism is the outcry of prisoner to prisoner from the cell in solitary where each is confined for the duration of his life.

America has only three cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans.
Everywhere else is Cleveland.

I always said little Truman had a voice so high it could only be detected by bats.

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.

I can't stand a naked light bulb, any more than I can a rude remark or a vulgar action.

Openings come quickly, sometimes, like blue space in running clouds. A complete overcast, then a blaze of light ...

Every time you come in yelling that God damn "Rise and Shine!" "Rise and Shine!" I say to myself, "How lucky dead people are!

I know all about the tyranny of women.

The most dangerous word in any human tongue is the word for brother. It's inflammatory.

I can't expose a human weakness on the stage unless I know it through having it myself.

Big Daddy: Ignorance - of morality - is a comfort.

Some single men stop drinking when they git married and others start!

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.

Only animals have to satisfy instincts! Surely your aims are somewhat higher than theirs! Than monkeys! Pigs!

A man, when he burns, leaves only a handful of ashes. No woman can hold him. The wind must blow him away.

Everybody is nothing until you love them.

I want to infect you with the tremendous excitement of living, because I believe that you have the strength to bear it.

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

Take by surprise and the world gives up resistance.

Love, all at once and much, much too completely. It's like you suddenly turn a blinding light on something that had always been half a shadow ...

He would die early, since nothing so fair could decline by common degrees in a faded season.

Of coherency, I usually attempt it.

Why is it so damn hard for people to talk?

I gave up visiting my psychoanalyst because he was meddling too much in my private life.

Luck is believing your lucky.

I think time is a merciless thing. I think life is a process of burning oneself out and time is the fire that burns you.

Nothing human disgusts me unless its unkind

It's almost impossible for anybody to believe that they're not loved by someone they believe they love. But honey, I love nobody.

Val: Why do you go out there?
Sandra: Because dead people give such good advice.
Val: What advice do they give?
Sandra: Just one word- live!

The human animal is a beast that dies but the fact that he's dying don't give him pity for others.

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 ...

Most of the confidence which I appear to feel, especially when influenced by noon wine, is only a pretense.

If I got rid of my demons, I'd lose my angels.

For a creative person there's just as much pleasure in writing an eight-line poem as there is in writing a blockbuster play ... of the old '50s type.

Big Daddy: Ignorance - of mortality - is a comfort.

No, truth is something desperate, an' she's got it. Believe me, it's something desperate, an' she's got it.

Only some radical change can divert the downward course of my spirit, some startling new place or people to arrest the drift, the drag.

What's talent but the ability to get away with something?

Is a lifetime long enough to hold the regret that I have for that fantastically aborted but crazily sweet love affair?

The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.

All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.

Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.

It's no tragedy, Freckles. Glass breaks so easily. No matter how careful you are.

Sometimes a man has got to hock his sweet used-to-be in order to finance his present situation...

All pretty girls are a trap, a pretty trap, and men expect them to be.

We are all civilized people, wich means that we are all savages at heart but observing a few amenities of civilized behaviour.

Human beings dream of life everlasting, that's the reason! But most of them want it on earth and not in heaven.

I don't think a married couple can go through life without laughs together any more than they can without tears.

This play is dedicated to the memory of Clarence Darrow, The Great Defender, whose mental frontiers were the four corners of the sky.

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.

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.

It is planned speeches that contain lies or dissimulations, not what you blurt out so spontaneously in one instant.

Just another four-letter word.

Morning can always be counted on to bring us back to a more realistic level.

Like a Cat on a hot tin roof

All of us are guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.

Don't you understand? I was PROCURING for him.

I'll be all right in a minute, I'm just bewildered - by life ...

Young, gifted, and destitute...

The work of a writer, his continuing work, depends for breath of life on a certain privacy of heart.

A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with.

The Jefferson is such a dignified hotel / There is no such thing.

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!

Keep awake, alive, new. Perform the paradox of being hard and yet soft. Survive without calcification of the tender membranes. Be a poet. Be alive.

The object of art is to make eternal the desperately fleeting moment.

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

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!

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.

But I think the spirit of man is a good adversary

Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental. It is not realistic.

Being disappointed is one thing and being discouraged is something else. I am disappointed but I am not discouraged.

Man is by instinct a lover, a hunter, a fighter.

I'm not living with you. We occupy the same cage. (Maggie)