Tennessee Williams: Trending quotes

“If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it.”

“Possess your soul in patience - you will see!”

“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”

Source: The Glass Menagerie

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

Source: Collected Stories

“Being disappointed is one thing and being discouraged is something else.”

Source: The Glass Menagerie

“Stella:
And when he comes back I cry on his lap like a baby..
[she smiles to herself]
Blanche:
I guess that is what is meant by being in love..”

Variant: Being disappointed is one thing and being discouraged is something else. I am disappointed but I am not discouraged.
Source: The Glass Menagerie

“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.”

Source: A Streetcar Named Desire

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

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

Tennessee Williams Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Source: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

“But here there was only hot swing music and liquor, dance halls, ban, and movies, and sex that hung in the gloom like a chandelier and flooded the world with brief, deceptive rainbows.”

“There is only one true aristocracy… and that is the aristocracy of passionate souls!”

Source: The Glass Menagerie

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

“My only point, the only point that I'm making, is life has got to be allowed to continue even after theof life is--all--over….”

Tennessee Williams Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Source: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

“Stanley:
Delicate piece she is.
Stella:
She is. She was. You didn't know Blanche as a girl. Nobody, nobody, was tender and trusting as she was. But people like you abused her, and forced her to change.”

“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!”

Source: A Streetcar Named Desire

Tennessee Williams Suddenly Last Summer

Source: Suddenly Last Summer

“The trouble with this world is that everybody has to compromise and conform.”

“The name of a person you love is more than language.”

“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.”

“It's like a switch, clickin' off in my head. Turns the hot light off and the cool one on, and all of a sudden there's peace.”

Source: A Streetcar Named Desire

Tennessee Williams Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Source: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

“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”