Tennessee Williams citations

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

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

“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?”

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

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

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

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

“In memory everything seems to happen to music.”

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

“Security is a kind of death.”

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

“People go to the movies instead of moving!”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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