Tennessee Williams Quotes

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

All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.

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.

It's interesting, isn't it? . . . the chandelier . . . it reminds me of mushroom soup.

Success is blocked by concentrating on it and planning for it... Success is shy - it won't come out while you're watching.

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

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

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

The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that's also a hypocrite!

Life is an unanswered question, but let's still believe in the dignity and importance of the question.

A prayer for the wild at heart kept in cages.

Friends are God's way of apologizing to us for our families

At the age of fourteen I discovered writing as an escape from a world of reality in which I felt acutely uncomfortable.

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

To begin with, I turn back time. I reverse it to that quaint period, the thirties, when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had failed them, or they had failed their eyes, and so they were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy.

Don't you just love these long rainy afternoons in New Orleans when an hour isn't just an hour — but a little bit of eternity dropped in your hands — and who knows what to do with it?

Everybody is nothing until you love them.

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.

We're all of us guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.

I don't want realism. I want magic!

Revolution only needs good dreamers who remember their dreams.

Time doesn't take away from true friendship, nor does separation.

For time is the longest distance between two places.

Devils can be driven out of the heart by the touch of a hand on a hand, or a mouth on a mouth.

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.

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.

Mendacity is a system that we live in," declares Brick. "Liquor is one way out an'death's the other.

Vanity, fear, desire, competition - all such distortions within our own egos - condition our vision of those in relation to us. Add to those distortions to our own egos the corresponding distortions in the egos of others, and you see how cloudy the glass must become through which we look at each other.

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.

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

You can be young without money but you can't be old without it.

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

Hell is yourself and the only redemption is when a person puts himself aside to feel deeply for another person.

The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.

A high station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace.

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

Success and failure are equally disastrous.

Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going.

Life is partly what we make it, and partly what it is made by the friends we choose.

To be free is to have achieved your life.

I try to work every day because you have no refuge but writing. When you're going through a period of unhappiness, a broken love affair, the death of someone you love, or some other disorder in your life, then you have no refuge but writing.

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

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

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

The rest of my days I'm going to spend on the sea. And when I die, I'm going to die on the sea. You know what I shall die of? I shall die of eating an unwashed grape. One day out on the ocean I will die — with my hand in the hand of some nice-looking ship's doctor, a very young one with a small blond moustache and a big silver watch.

When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.

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

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!

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

Enthusiasm is the most important thing in life.