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Tennessee Williams Quotes
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Thomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams III was an American playwright. Along with Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller, he is considered among the three foremost playwrights of 20th-century American drama.

After years of obscurity, he became suddenly famous with The Glass Menagerie , a play that closely reflected his own unhappy family background. This heralded a string of successes, including A Streetcar Named Desire , Cat on a Hot Tin Roof , and Sweet Bird of Youth . His later work attempted a new style that did not appeal to audiences, and alcohol and drug dependence further inhibited his creative output. His drama A Streetcar Named Desire is often numbered on short lists of the finest American plays of the 20th century alongside Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.

Much of Williams' most acclaimed work was adapted for the cinema. He also wrote short stories, poetry, essays and a volume of memoirs. In 1979, four years before his death, Williams was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.

✵ 26. March 1911 – 25. February 1983
Tennessee Williams photo
Tennessee Williams: 139 quotes202 likes

Tennessee Williams Quotes

“The Venus flytrap, a devouring organism, aptly named for the goddess of love.”

Tennessee Williams Suddenly Last Summer

Source: Suddenly Last Summer

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

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”

Tennessee Williams A Streetcar Named Desire

Source: A Streetcar Named Desire

“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.”

Tennessee Williams Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Source: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

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

Tennessee Williams

“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!”

Tennessee Williams Suddenly Last Summer

Source: Suddenly Last Summer

“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.”

Tennessee Williams A Streetcar Named Desire

Source: A Streetcar Named Desire

“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

“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.”

Tennessee Williams The Glass Menagerie

Source: The Glass Menagerie

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

Tennessee Williams Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Source: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

“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..”

Tennessee Williams A Streetcar Named Desire

Source: A Streetcar Named Desire

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

Tennessee Williams The Glass Menagerie

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

“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”

Tennessee Williams

Source: Collected Stories

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

Tennessee Williams The Glass Menagerie

Source: The Glass Menagerie

“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”

Tennessee Williams

“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.”

Tennessee Williams A Streetcar Named Desire

Source: A Streetcar Named Desire

“Young, gifted, and destitute…”

Tennessee Williams

“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.”

Tennessee Williams A Streetcar Named Desire

Source: A Streetcar Named Desire

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

Tennessee Williams Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Source: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

“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?”

Tennessee Williams Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Source: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

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

Tennessee Williams Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Source: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

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

Tennessee Williams

Source: The Selected Letters, Vol. 1: 1920-1945

“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…”

Tennessee Williams The Glass Menagerie

Laura, Scene Seven
The Glass Menagerie (1944)

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

Tennessee Williams Suddenly Last Summer

Mrs. Venable, Scene One
Suddenly Last Summer (1958)

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

Tennessee Williams The Glass Menagerie

Amanda, Scene Seven
The Glass Menagerie (1944)

“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!”

Tennessee Williams The Glass Menagerie

Amanda, Scene Three
The Glass Menagerie (1944)

“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!”

Tennessee Williams Summer and Smoke

Alma, Scene Eleven
Summer and Smoke (1948)

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

Tennessee Williams

After meeting Anna Magnani, as quoted in Tennessee Williams : Rebellious Puritan (1961) by Nancy Marie Patterson Tischler, p. 175

“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!”

Tennessee Williams The Glass Menagerie

Amanda, Scene Six
The Glass Menagerie (1944)

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

Tennessee Williams The Glass Menagerie

Jim, Scene Seven
The Glass Menagerie (1944)

“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…”

Tennessee Williams Camino Real

Sancho
Camino Real (1953)

“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.”

Tennessee Williams Sweet Bird of Youth

Sweet Bird of Youth, Act 3 http://books.google.com/books?id=5eqagR0rbboC&q=%22I+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%22&pg=PA96#v=onepage (1959)

“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...”

Tennessee Williams Suddenly Last Summer

Mrs. Venable, Scene One
Suddenly Last Summer (1958)

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

Tennessee Williams

No known citation to Williams. Attributed in Quote Unquote (A Handbook of Quotations), 2005, MP Singh, Lotus Press.
The full quote is captured in a letter Tennessee wrote to Donald Windham and can be found on pages 57 and 58 of Tennessee WIlliams' Letters to Donald Windham. The quote is not misattributed.
Misattributed

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

Tennessee Williams

Actually by the Chinese philosopher, educator and popular lecturer Dr. Tehyi Hsieh, Chinese epigrams inside out, and proverbs, 1948.
Misattributed
Variant: 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.”

Tennessee Williams The Glass Menagerie

Amanda, Scene Seven
The Glass Menagerie (1944)

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

Tennessee Williams Summer and Smoke

Alma, Prologue
Summer and Smoke (1948)

“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.”

Tennessee Williams Suddenly Last Summer

Mrs. Venable, Scene One
Suddenly Last Summer (1958)

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

Tennessee Williams

"I am widely regarded as the ghost of a writer," (1977), from New Selected Essays: Where I Live, ed. John S. Bak and John Lahr (New Directions Publishing, 2009)

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

Tennessee Williams The Glass Menagerie

Tom, Scene Four
The Glass Menagerie (1944)

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

Tennessee Williams Summer and Smoke

Alma, Scene Twelve
Summer and Smoke (1948)

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

Tennessee Williams The Glass Menagerie

Laura, Scene Two
The Glass Menagerie (1944)

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

Tennessee Williams The Rose Tattoo

Rosa, Act Three, Scene Three
The Rose Tattoo (1951)