Tennessee Williams Quotes

“I've got the guts to die. What I want to know is, have you got the guts to live?”

Source: Conversations with Tennessee Williams

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

Source: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

“A Prayer for the Wild at Heart That Are Kept in Cages”

Tennessee Williams Stairs to the Roof

This is the subtitle of the play
Source: Stairs to the Roof (1941)

“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.”

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

Source: A Streetcar Named Desire

“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.”

Source: Memoirs

Tennessee Williams Quotes about people

“People go to the movies instead of moving!”

Source: Memoirs

“All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.”

Tom, Scene Six
Source: The Glass Menagerie (1944)
Context: 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 The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore

The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore (1963)

“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.”

“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.”

“I don't want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic. I try to give that to people. I do misrepresent things. I don't tell truths. I tell what ought to be truth.”

Quoted in "Tennessee Williams" in Profiles (1990) by Kenneth Tynan (first published as a magazine article in February 1956)

“Has it ever struck you that life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quick you hardly catch it going?”

Source: A Streetcar Named Desire

Tennessee Williams Quotes about life

Tennessee Williams The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore

Source: The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore

“We're all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.”

Tennessee Williams Orpheus Descending

Val ( Act 2, Scene 1 http://books.google.com/books?id=oOhF2S_tsIoC&q=%22We're+all+of+us+sentenced+to+solitary+confinement+inside+our+own+skins+for+life%22&pg=PA33#v=onepage) <br class="br">Orpheus Descending (1957)

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

“Time goes by so fast. Nothin' can outrun it. Death commences too early--almost before you're half-acquainted with life--you meet the other.”

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

Source: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

“Enthusiasm is the most important thing in life.”

Source: The Glass Menagerie

“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: Trending quotes

“All of my gentlemen callers were sons of planters and of course I assumed that I would be married to one and raise my family on a large piece of land with plenty of servants. But man proposes — and woman accepts the proposal!”

Source: A Streetcar Named Desire

“Security is a kind of death.”

To vary that old, old saying a little bit — I married no planter! I married a man who worked for the telephone company!
Amanda, Scene Six
The Glass Menagerie (1944)

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

Tennessee Williams Quotes

“I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”

“How beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken.”

Source: A Streetcar Named Desire

“In memory everything seems to happen to music.”

Source: The Glass Menagerie

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

Tom (As Narrator Scene One)
Source: The Glass Menagerie (1944)

“Security is a kind of death.”

Amanda, Scene Six
Source: The Glass Menagerie (1944)

“Don't you just love those long rainy afternoons in New Orleans when an hour isn't just an hour - but a little piece of eternity dropped into your hands - and who knows what to do with it?”

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

Source: A Streetcar Named Desire

“The future is called "perhaps," which is the only possible thing to call the future. And the important thing is not to allow that to scare you.”

Tennessee Williams Orpheus Descending

Source: "The Past, the Present and the Perhaps," http://books.google.com/books?id=mTRaAAAAMAAJ&q=%22The+future+is+called+perhaps+which+is+the+only+possible+thing+to+call+the+future+And+the+important+thing+is+not+to+allow+that+to+scare+you%22&pg=PA7#v=onepage introduction to Orpheus Descending (1957)

“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?”

“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.”

Source: Collected Stories

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

“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.”

Don Quixote in Prologue
Variant: When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.
Source: Camino Real (1953)

Tennessee Williams The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore

Christopher
Source: The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore (1963)

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

Tennessee Williams Sweet Bird of Youth

Source: Sweet Bird of Youth

“The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.”

“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.”

Source: Camino Real

“Living with someone you love can be lonelier than living entirely alone, if the one that you love doesn't love you.”

“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!”

Source: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Other Plays

“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!”

Amanda, Scene One
The Glass Menagerie (1944)

“I'm tired of the movies and I am about to move!”

Source: A Streetcar Named Desire

“Revolution only needs good dreamers who remember their dreams.”

Tom, Scene Six
The Glass Menagerie (1944)
Context: 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!

“I think that moral earnestness is a good thing for any times, but particularly for these times.”

Camino Real (1953)
Context: 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."

“Why you're not crippled, you just have a little defect — hardly noticeable, even!”

Program notes for a Pasadena Playhouse production of Stairs to the Roof (1947)
Context: When I look back at Stairs to the Roof... I see its faults very plainly, as plainly as you may see them, but still I do not feel apologetic about this play. Unskilled and awkward as I was at this initial period of my playwriting, I certainly had a moral earnestness which I cannot boast of today, and I think that moral earnestness is a good thing for any times, but particularly for these times. I wish I still had the idealistic passion of Benjamin Murphy! You may smile as I do at the sometimes sophomoric aspect of his excitement, but I hope you will respect, as I do, the purity of his feeling and the honest concern which he had in his heart for the basic problem of mankind, which is to dignify our lives with a certain freedom.

“Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.”

Amanda, Scene Two
The Glass Menagerie (1944)
Context: 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!

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

“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.”

Source: Camino Real

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

Tom, as Narrator, in Scene One
Source: The Glass Menagerie (1944)

“Deliberate cruelty is unforgivable.

--Blanche Dubois”

“I don't want realism. I want magic!”

Source: Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire

“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!”

Source: A Streetcar Named Desire

“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.”

Source: A Streetcar Named Desire

“Oh, you can't describe someone you're in love with!”

Variant: 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.
Source: The Glass Menagerie

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

Source: A Streetcar Named Desire

“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…”

Tom, Scene Three
Source: The Glass Menagerie (1944)

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

Source: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof