Tennessee Williams Quotes

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.

— Tennessee Williams

All of us are guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.

— Tennessee Williams

“You are the only young man that I know of who ignores the fact that the future becomes the present, the present the past, and the past turns into everlasting regret if you don't plan for it.”

— Tennessee Williams

“Why is it so damn hard for people to talk?”

— Tennessee Williams

Oh, you weak, beautiful people who give up with such grace. What you need is someone to take hold of you
gently, with love, and hand your life back to you, like something gold you let go of
and I can! I'm determined to do it
and nothing's more determined than a cat on a tin roof
is there?

— Tennessee Williams

“They told me to take a streetcar named Desire and then transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at - Elysian Fields!”

— Tennessee Williams

“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

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

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

“It is only in his work that an artist can find reality and satisfaction, for the actual world is less intense than the world of his invention and consequently his life, without recourse to violent disorder, does not seem very substantial. The right condition for him is that in which his work in not only convenient but unavoidable.”

— Tennessee Williams

Q.Do you have any positive message, in your opinion?
A.Indeed I do think that I do.
Q.Such as what?
A.The crying, almost screaming, need of a great worldwide human effort to know ourselves and each other a great deal better, well enough to concede that no man has a monopoly on right or virtue any more than any man has a corner on duplicity and evil and so forth. If people, and races and nations, would start with that self-manifest truth, then I think that the world could sidestep the sort of corruption which I have involuntarily chosen as the basic, allegorical theme of my plays as a whole.

— Tennessee Williams

“Openings come quickly, sometimes, like blue space in running clouds. A complete overcast, then a blaze of light ...”

— Tennessee Williams

“It is almost as if you were frantically constructing another world while the world that you live in dissolves beneath your feet, and that your survival depends on completing this construction at least one second before the old habitation collapses.”

— Tennessee Williams

“I've never cared whether I shock people because I think people shocked by the truth are not deserving of the truth. The truth is something one has to deserve”

— Tennessee Williams

“The show is over. The monkey's dead!”

— Tennessee Williams

“Distant singing is heard. Ghostly voices become audible: fragments of lectures remembered, the finely distilled wisdom and passion of seers and poets with which the modern young mind is tempered for the world that blows it to pieces.”

— Tennessee Williams

“I'll tell you what I want. Magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misinterpret things to them. I don't tell the truth. I tell what ought to be truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it! - Don't turn the light on!”

— Tennessee Williams

“The great and only possible dignity of man lies in his power deliberately to choose certain moral values by which to live as steadfastly as if he, too, like a character in a play, were immured against the corrupting rush of time. Snatching the eternal out of the desperately fleeting is the great magic trick of human existence. As far as we know, as far as there exists any kind of empiric evidence, there is no way to beat the beat the game of being against non-being, in which non-being is the predestined victor on realistic levels.”

— Tennessee Williams

“Margaret: Oh you weak people, you weak, beautiful people! - who give up. What you want is someone to [she turns out the rose-silk lamp] take hold of you. Gently, gently, with love! And I do love you, Brick, I do!
Brick [smiling with charming sadness]: Wouldn't it be funny if that was true?”

— Tennessee Williams

He would die early, since nothing so fair could decline by common degrees in a faded season.

— Tennessee Williams

“I'm not good. I don't know why people have to pretend to be good, nobody's good.”

— Tennessee Williams

“She laughs frequently and wildly and with a sort of precocious, tragic abandon.”

— Tennessee Williams

I believe that the silence of God, the absolute speechlessness of Him is a long, long and awful thing that the whole world is lost because of.

— Tennessee Williams

“You love your people but you don't understand them. They find God in each other. And when they lose each other, they lose God and they're lost. And it's hard to help them”

— Tennessee Williams

“I will read long books and the journals of dead writers. I will feel closer to them than I ever felt to people I used to know before I withdrew from the world. It will be sweet and cool this friendship of mine with dead poets, for I won't have to touch them or answer their questions. They will talk to me and not expect me to answer. And I'll get sleepy listening to their voices explaining the mysteries to me. I'll fall asleep with the book still in my fingers, and it will rain.”

— Tennessee Williams

“[Her delicate beauty must avoid a strong light. There is something about her uncertain manner, as well as her white clothes, that suggests a moth.]”

— Tennessee Williams

“[The Writer silently passes her a pint bottle of whiskey.] Thank you, Mr.
?
WRITER: Chekhov! Anton Pavlovitch Chekhov!
MRS HARDWICKE-MOORE [smiling with the remnants of coquetry]: Thank you, Mr.
Chekhov.”

— Tennessee Williams

“The human animal is a selfish beast ...”

— Tennessee Williams

He was always running or bounding, never just walking. He seemed always at the point of defeating the law of gravity.

— Tennessee Williams

“Did you suppose that fornication was the straight line upwards that I'd been trying to find?”

— Tennessee Williams

“It's no tragedy, Freckles. Glass breaks so easily. No matter how careful you are.”

— Tennessee Williams

“The trouble is that I am being bullied and intimidated by my own success and the fame that surrounds it and what people expect of me and their demands on me. They are forcing me out of my natural position as an artist so that I am in peril of ceasing to be an artist at all. When that happens I will be nothing because I cannot be a professional writer.”

— Tennessee Williams

“Keep awake, alive, new. Perform the paradox of being hard and yet soft. Survive without calcification of the tender membranes. Be a poet. Be alive.”

— Tennessee Williams

We have not long to love.
Light does not stay.
The tender things are those
we fold away.
Coarse fabrics are the ones
for common wear.
In silence I have watched you
comb your hair.
Intimate the silence,
dim and warm.
I could but did not, reach
to touch your arm.
I could, but do not, break
that which is still.
(Almost the faintest whisper
would be shrill.)
So moments pass as though
they wished to stay.
We have not long to love.
A night. A day ...

— Tennessee Williams

“His beauty was notable even in a province where the lack of it is more exceptional in a young man.”

— Tennessee Williams

“Ignorance of mortality is a comfort.”

— Tennessee Williams

He always entered the house as though he were entering it with the intention of tearing it down from inside

— Tennessee Williams

“I know so well what becomes of unmarried women who aren't prepared to occupy a position. I've seen such pitiful cases in the South barely tolerated spinsters living upon the grudging patronage of sister's husband or brother's wife! stuck away in some little mouse-trap of a room encouraged by one in-law to visit another little birdlike women without any nest eating the crust of humility all their life! Is that the future that we've mapped out for ourselves?”

— Tennessee Williams

“Physical beauty is passing - a transitory possession - but beauty of the mind, richness of the spirit, tenderness of the heart - I have all these things - aren't taken away but grow! Increase with the years!”

— Tennessee Williams

“Only some radical change can divert the downward course of my spirit, some startling new place or people to arrest the drift, the drag.”

— Tennessee Williams

“Vanity, fear, desire, competition - all such distortions within our own egos - condition our vision of those in relation to us. Add to those distortions to our own egos the corresponding distortions in the egos of others, and you see how cloudy the glass must become through which we look at each other.”

— Tennessee Williams

“The work of a writer, his continuing work, depends for breath of life on a certain privacy of heart.”

— Tennessee Williams

The mountain violets break the rocks.

— Tennessee Williams

“The helpless can't help the helpless.”

— Tennessee Williams

“My greatest affliction ... is perhaps the major theme of my writings, the affliction of loneliness that follows me like a shadow, a very ponderous shadow too heavy to drag after me all of my days and nights.”

— Tennessee Williams

“Mexico is the front door to South America - and the back door to the states ...”

— Tennessee Williams

I don't have an audience in mind when I write. I'm writing mainly for myself. After a long devotion to playwriting I have a good inner ear. I know pretty well how a thing is going to sound on the stage, and how it will play. I write to satisfy this inner ear and its perceptions. That's the audience I write for.

— 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

“We're left alone with each other. We have to creep close to each other and give gentle little nudges with our paws and our muzzles before we can slip into sleep and rest for the next day's playtime.”

— Tennessee Williams

“A man, when he burns, leaves only a handful of ashes. No woman can hold him. The wind must blow him away.”

— Tennessee Williams