Tennessee Williams Quotes

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

— Tennessee Williams

“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.”

— Tennessee Williams

“In memory, everything seems to happen to music.”

— Tennessee Williams

“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.”

— Tennessee Williams

“Deliberate cruelty is unforgivable.”

— Tennessee Williams

“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

“Enthusiasm is the most important thing in life.”

— Tennessee Williams

“What is the victory of a cat on a hot tin roof?-I wish I knew ... Just staying on it, I guess, as long as she can ...”

— Tennessee Williams

“In all these years, you never believed I loved you. And I did. I did so much. I did love you. I even loved your hate and your hardness.”

— Tennessee Williams

“Don't look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you'll know you're dead.”

— Tennessee Williams

“Everybody is nothing until you love them.”

— Tennessee Williams

“Mendacity is a system that we live in," declares Brick. "Liquor is one way out an'death's the other.”

— Tennessee Williams

“I'm not living with you. We occupy the same cage. (Maggie)”

— Tennessee Williams

“People go to the movies instead of moving.”

— Tennessee Williams

“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?”

— Tennessee Williams

“Time goes by so fast. Nothin' can outrun it. Death commences too early
almost before you're half-acquainted with life
you meet the other.”

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

“Yes, movies! Look at them - All of those glamorous people - having adventures - hogging it all, gobbling the whole thing up! You know what happens? People go to the movies instead of moving! Hollywood characters are supposed to have all the adventures for everybody in America, while everybody in America sits in a dark room and watches them have them! Yes, until there's a war. That's when adventure becomes available to the masses! Everyone's dish, not only Gable's! Then the people in the dark room come out of the dark room to have some adventures themselves - Goody, goody! - It's our turn now, to go to the south Sea Island - to make a safari - to be exotic, far-off! - But I'm not patient. I don't want to wait till then. I'm tired of the movies and I am about to move!”

— Tennessee Williams

“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.”

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

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?

— Tennessee Williams

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

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

— Tennessee Williams

“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

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

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

“As for me, no one will ever love me. But you could get used to me, couldn't you, Jimmy?”

— Tennessee Williams

“Security is a kind of death.”

— Tennessee Williams

“The panic disappeared under those soothing old fingers and the breathing slowed down and stopped hurting the chest as if a fox was caught in it, and then at last Mr. Kroger began to lecture the boy as he used to, Pablo, he murmured, don't ever be so afraid of being lonely that you forget to be careful. Don't forget that you will find it sometimes but other times you won't be lucky, and those are the times when you have got to be patient, since patience is what you must have when you don't have luck. ("The Mysteries of the Joy Rio")”

— Tennessee Williams

“Big Daddy: Ignorance - of morality - is a comfort.”

— Tennessee Williams

“We mustn't scream at each other, the walls in this house have ears ...”

— Tennessee Williams

“This play is dedicated to the memory of Clarence Darrow, The Great Defender, whose mental frontiers were the four corners of the sky.”

— Tennessee Williams

“The low-tone clarinet moans. The door upstairs opens again. Stella slips down the rickety stairs in her robe. Her eyes are glistening with tears and her hair loose about her throat and shoulders. They stare at each other. Then they come together with low, animal moans. He falls to his knees on the steps and presses his face to her belly, curving a little with maternity. Her eyes go blind with tenderness as she catches his head and raises him level with her. He snatches the screen door open and lifts her off her feet and bears her into the dark flat.”

— Tennessee Williams

“And in this city a man will go mad with paresis, another with terror, a third will drown himself and the newspapers will report death from cancer and cerebral hemorrhage among our leading citizens, and there will casual mention of various epidemics, of lust murders, of famine and starvation, and the decline of Utilities on the New York Exchange. But all that's forgotten tonight, God's asleep. And if you have any questions to ask about the chaotic conditions on this little spherical toy of his, you'll have to refer them to his secretary, who will send you form letter No. X99 explaining that accidents will happen and that of course God's ways are necessarily rather obscure to man.”

— Tennessee Williams

“What's talent but the ability to get away with something?”

— Tennessee Williams

“I soon found myself becoming indifferent to people. A well cynicism rose in me. Conversations all sounded as if they had been recorded years ago and were being played back on a turntable.”

— Tennessee Williams

Let's go down and swim in that liquid moonlight.

— Tennessee Williams

“Later tonight am going to tell you that I love you and maybe by that time you will be drunk enough to believe me.”

— Tennessee Williams

“The nervous system of any age or nation is its creative workers, its artists. And if that nervous system is profoundly disturbed by its environment, the work it produces will inescapably reflect the disturbances, sometimes obliquely and sometimes with violent directness.”

— Tennessee Williams

“I can't expose a human weakness on the stage unless I know it through having it myself.”

— Tennessee Williams

“I don't want realism. I want magic!”

— Tennessee Williams

The object of art is to make eternal the desperately fleeting moment.

— Tennessee Williams

“I talk out the lines as I write them.”

— Tennessee Williams

“The process by which the idea for a play comes to me has always been something I really couldn't pinpoint. A play just seems to materialize; like an apparition, it gets clearer and clearer and clearer. It's very vague at first, as in the case of Streetcar, which came after Menagerie. I simply had the vision of a woman in her late youth. She was sitting in a chair all alone by a window with the moonlight streaming in on her desolate face, and she'd been stood up by the man she planned to marry.”

— Tennessee Williams

“There is no pleasure in the world like writing well and going fast. It's like nothing else. It's like a love affair, it goes on and on, and doesn't end in marriage. It's all courtship.”

— Tennessee Williams

Youth must be wanton, youth must be quick, Dance to the candle while lasteth the wick.

— Tennessee Williams

“The only unforgivable sin is deliberate cruelty.”

— Tennessee Williams

“Nobody sees anybody truly but only through the flaws of their own ego.”

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

“For a creative person there's just as much pleasure in writing an eight-line poem as there is in writing a blockbuster play ... of the old '50s type.”

— Tennessee Williams