Tennessee Williams Quotes

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“Maggie, we're through with lies and liars in this house. Lock the door.”

“attempting to find in motion what was lost in space.”

“When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I'm only really alive when I'm writing.”

“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”

“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.”

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

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

“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!”

“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.”

“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….”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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..”

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

“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”

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

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

“Nobody knew my rose of the world but me… I had too much glory. They don't want glory like that in nobody's heart”

“You're simple, straightforward and honest, a little bit on the primitive side, I should think. To interest you a woman would have to…
-To lay her cards out on the table.”

“Young, gifted, and destitute…”

“When I was sixteen, I made the discovery -- love. All at once and much, much too completely. It was like you suddenly turned a blinding light on something that had always been half in shadow, that's how it struck the world for me.”

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

“How long does it have to go on? This punishment? Haven't I done time enough, haven't I served my term? can't I apply for a-pardon?”

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

“A drinking man's someone who wants to forget he isn't still young and believing”

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

“I'll just imagine he had an operation. The horn was removed to make him feel less — freakish! Now he will feel more at home with the other horses, the ones that don't have horns…”

“We saw the Encantadas, but on the Encantadas we saw something Melville hadn't written about.”

“You don't know things anywhere! You live in a dream; you manufacture illusions!”

“I took that horrible novel back to the library — yes! That hideous book by that insane Mr. Lawrence. I cannot control the output of diseased minds or people who cater to them — BUT I WON'T ALLOW SUCH FILTH BROUGHT INTO MY HOUSE! No, no, no, no, no!”

“The tables have turned, yes, the tables have turned with a vengeance! You've come around to my old way of thinking and I to yours like two people exchanging a call on each other at the same time, and each one finding the other one gone out, the door locked against him and no one to answer the bell!”

“I never saw a more beautiful woman, enormous eyes, skin the color of Devonshire cream.”

“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! — To vary that old, old saying a little bit — I married no planter! I married a man who worked for the telephone company!”

“Shakespeare probably wrote a poem on that light bill, Mrs. Wingfield.”

“I know this place. … Here it is on the chart. Look, it says here: "Continue until you come to the square of a walled town which is the end of the Camino Real and the beginning of the Camino Real. Halt there," it says, "and turn back, Traveler, for the spring of humanity has gone dry in this place…”

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

“Well, now I've said it, my son was looking for God. I mean for a clear image of Him. He spent that whole blazing equatorial day in the crow's nest of the schooner watching that thing on the beach of the Encantadas till it was too dark to see it, and when he came back down the rigging, he said, Well, now I've seen Him!—and he meant God...”

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

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

“Things have a way of turning out so badly.”

“Eternity!—Didn't it give you the cold shivers?”

“And the sand all alive, all alive, as the hatched sea-turtles made their dash for the sea, while the birds hovered and swooped to attack and hovered and—swooped to attack! They were diving down on the hatched sea-turtles, turning them over to expose their soft undersides, tearing the undersides open and rending and eating their flesh.”

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

“Man is by instinct a lover, a hunter, a fighter, and none of those instincts are given much play at the warehouse!”

“You'll be surprised how infinitely merciful they are. The prescription number is 96814. I think of it as the telephone number of God!”

“Mother, when you're disappointed, you get that awful suffering look on your face, like the picture of Jesus' mother in the museum!”

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