Tennessee Williams Quotes

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

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

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

I go to the movies because – I like adventure. Adventure is something I don’t have much of at work, so I go to the movies.

~ Tennessee Williams

Yes, movies! Look at them — All of those glamorous people — having adventures — hogging it all, gobbling the whole thing up! You know what happens? People go to the movies instead of moving! Hollywood characters are supposed to have all the adventures for everybody in America, while everybody in America sits in a dark room and watches them have them! Yes, until there's a war. That's when adventure becomes available to the masses! Everyone's dish, not only Gable's! Then the people in the dark room come out of the dark room to have some adventures themselves — Goody, goody! — It's our turn now, to go to the south Sea Island — to make a safari — to be exotic, far-off! — But I'm not patient. I don't want to wait till then. I'm tired of the movies and I am about to move!

~ Tennessee Williams

I don't ask for your pity, but just for your understanding – not even that – no. Just for some recognition of me in you, and the enemy, time, in us all.

~ Tennessee Williams

The human animal is a beast that dies and if he's got money he buys and buys and buys and I think the reason he buys everything he can buy is that in the back of his mind he has the crazy hope that one of his purchases will be life everlasting!--Which it never can be....

~ Tennessee Williams

When you look at a piece of delicately spun glass you think of two things: how beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken.

~ Tennessee Williams

All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.

~ Tennessee Williams

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

When something is Festering on your memory or in 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. Silence about a thing just magnifies it. It grows and festers in silence, becomes malignant...

~ Tennessee Williams

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

~ Tennessee Williams

He acts like an animal, has an animal's habits! Eats like one, moves like one, talks like one! There's even something -sub-human -something not quite to the stage of humanity yet! Yes, something - ape-like about him, like one of those pictures I've seen in - anthropological studies! Thousands and thousands of years have passed him right by, and there he is - Stanley Kowalski - survivor of the Stone Age! Bearing the raw meat home from the kill in the jungle! And you - you here - waiting for him! Maybe he'll strike you or maybe grunt and kiss you! That is, if kisses have been discovered yet! Night falls and the other apes gather! There in the front of the cave, all grunting like him, and swilling and gnawing and hulking! His poker night! - you call it - this party of apes! Somebody growls - some creature snatches at something - the fight is on! God! Maybe we are a long way from beng made in God's image, but Stella - my sister - there has been some progress since then! Such things as art - as poetry and music - such kinds of new light have come into the world since then! In some kinds of people some tendered feelings have had some little beginning! That we have got to make grow! And cling to, and hold as our flag! In this dark march towards what-ever it is we're approaching . . . Don't - don't hang back with the brutes!

~ Tennessee Williams

Of course, you were crowned with laurel in the beginning, your gold hair was wreathed with laurel, but the gold is thinning and the laurel has withered. Face it – pitiful monster.

~ Tennessee Williams

...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...

~ Tennessee Williams

CORNELIA: -Sit down. Don't leave the table.GRACE: -Is that an order?CORNELIA: -I don't give orders to you, I make requests.GRACE: -Sometimes the requests of an employer are hard to distinguish from orders. [She sits down]

~ Tennessee Williams

The panic disappeared under those soothing old fingers and the breathing slowed down and stopped hurting the chest as if a fox was caught in it, and then at last Mr. Kroger began to lecture the boy as he used to, Pablo, he murmured, don't ever be so afraid of being lonely that you forget to be careful. Don't forget that you will find it sometimes but other times you won't be lucky, and those are the times when you have got to be patient, since patience is what you must have when you don't have luck. (The Mysteries of the Joy Rio)

~ Tennessee Williams

What is the victory of a cat on a hot tin roof?—I wish I knew... Just staying on it, I guess, as long as she can...

~ Tennessee Williams

These are the intensities that one cannot live with, that he has to outgrow if he wants to survive. But who can help grieving for them? If the blood vessels could hold them, how much better to keep those early loves with us?

~ Tennessee Williams

We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.

~ Tennessee Williams

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

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

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

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

~ Tennessee Williams

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

~ Tennessee Williams

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

~ Tennessee Williams

We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it.

~ Tennessee Williams

We have to distrust each other. It is our only defence against betrayal.

~ Tennessee Williams

We have to distrust each other. It's our only defense against betrayal.

~ Tennessee Williams

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

~ Tennessee Williams

This was a respect in which he paid due homage to the wise old spirit of the late Emiel Kroger, that romantically practical Teuton who used to murmur to Pablo, between sleeping and waking, a sort of incantation that went like his: Sometimes you will find it and other times you won't find it and the times you don't find it are the times when you have got to be careful. Those are the times when you have got to remember that other times you will find it, not this time but the next time, or the time after that, and then you've got to be able to go home without it, yes, those times are the times when you have got to be able to go home without it, go home alone without it...

~ 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

He was always running or bounding, never just walking. He seemed always at the point of defeating the law of gravity.

~ Tennessee Williams

Luck is believing your lucky.

~ Tennessee Williams

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

~ Tennessee Williams

The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.

~ Tennessee Williams

Princess, the great difference between people in this world is not between the rich and the poor or the good and the evil, the biggest of all differences in this world is between the ones that had or have the pleasure in love and those that haven't and hadn't any pleasure in love, but just watched it with envy, sick envy. The spectators and the performers.

~ Tennessee Williams

People go to the movies instead of moving.

~ Tennessee Williams

Some things are not forgiveable. Deliberate cruelty is not forgiveable. It is the most unforgiveable thing in my opinion, and the one thing in which I have never, ever been guilty.

~ Tennessee Williams

Deliberate cruelty is unforgivable.--Blanche Dubois

~ Tennessee Williams