Tennessee Williams citations

Page 3

“We've had this date with each other from the beginning.”

“Val: Why do you go out there?
Sandra: Because dead people give such good advice.
Val: What advice do they give?
Sandra: Just one word- live!”

“She lives in a world of her own – a world of – little glass ornaments…”

“Never inside, I didn't lie in my heart…”

“But there are things that happen between a man and a woman in the dark -- that sort of make everything else seem -- unimportant.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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”