Tennessee williams quotes

We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.

attempting to find in motion what was lost in space.

Kill off all my demons and my angels might die too.

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.

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!

The only unforgivable sin is deliberate cruelty.

All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.

I don't believe in "original sin." I don't believe in "guilt." I don't believe in villains or heroes - only right or wrong ways that individuals have taken, not by choice but by necessity or by certain still-uncomprehended influences in themselves, their circumstances, and their antecedents. This is so simple I'm ashamed to say it, but I'm sure it's true. In fact, I would bet my life on it! And that's why I don't understand why our propaganda machines are always trying to teach us, to persuade us, to hate and fear other people on the same little world that we live in.

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.

And it was about then, about that time, that I began to find life unsatisfactory as an explanation of itself and was forced to adopt the method of the artist of not explaining but putting the blocks together in some other way that seems more significant to him. Which is a rather fancy way of saying I started writing.

You see, baby, after a glass or two of wine I’m inclined to extravagance.

Everybody is nothing until you love them.

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

Nobody sees anybody truly, but all through the flaws of their own ego.

For there was a conspiracy of dullness in the world, a universal plan to shut out the resurgences of spirit which might interfere with clockwork. Better to keep your elevation unseen until it is higher than strangers' hands can reach to pull you down to their level.

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

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

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

Of course you always had that detached quality as if you were playing a game without much concern over whether you won or lost, and now that you've lost the game, not lost but just quit playing, you have that rare sort of charm that usually only happens in very old or hopelessly sick people, the charm of the defeated.

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.

To be free is to have achieved your life.

Nothing's more determined than a cat on a hot tin roof.

Devils can be driven out of the heart by the touch of a hand on a hand, or a mouth on a mouth.

A prayer for the wild at heart kept in cages.

I have always been more interested in creating a character that contains something crippled. I think nearly all of us have some kind of defect.

The most dangerous word in any human tongue is the word for brother. It's inflammatory.

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

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

Success and failure are equally disastrous.

America has only three cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland.

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.

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

The biggest of all differences in this world is between the ones that had or have pleasure in love and those that haven't and hadn't any pleasure in love, but just watched with sick envy.

When I was fourteen, my father decided to initiate me into the ways of manhood, and took me to the local whorehouse. The woman spread her legs, and made me look between them. All I could see was something that looked like a dyin' orchid; consequently, I have never been comfortable around women or orchids.

I respect a person that has had to fight and howl for his decency.

There is no pleasure in the world like writing well and going fast.

All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent.

The strongest influences in my life and my work are always whomever I love. Whomever I love and am with most of the time, or whomever I remember most vividly. I think that's true of everyone, don't you?

The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.

Time doesn't take away from true friendship, nor does separation.

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

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

If you can't be yourself, what's the point of being anyone else?

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?

All creative work, all life in a sense, is a cri de coeur.

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.

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

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.

All good art is an indiscretion.

Don't you just love these long rainy afternoons in New Orleans when an hour isn't just an hour — but a little bit of eternity dropped in your hands — and who knows what to do with it?

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

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

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

For time is the longest distance between two places.

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.

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.

I don't want realism. I want magic!

We are all of us born, live and die in the shadow of a giant question mark that refers to three questions: Where do we come from? Why? And where, oh where, are we going!

I can't stand a naked light bulb, any more than I can a rude remark or a vulgar action.

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

There comes a time when you look into the mirror and you realize that what you see is all that you will ever be. And then you accept it. Or you kill yourself. Or you stop looking in mirrors.

A bedroom is just as nice as whoever sleeps in it with you.

I believe the way to write a good play is to convince yourself it is easy to do, then go ahead and do it with ease.

Oh you weak, beautiful people who give up with such grace. What you need is someone to take hold of you

Revolution only needs good dreamers who remember their dreams.

Glass breaks so easily. No matter how careful you are.

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 are not so dreadful when you know them. That's what you have to remember! And everybody has problems, not just you, but practically everybody has got some problems. You think of yourself as having the only problems, as being the only one who is disappointed. But just look around you and you will see lots of people as disappointed as you are.

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

Something in me will save me from utter ruin no matter what comes.

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

Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.

Marriage is an economic arrangement in many ways, let's face it.

Snatching the eternal out of the desperately fleeting is the great magic trick of human existence.

The helpless can't help the helpless.

At the age of fourteen I discovered writing as an escape from a world of reality in which I felt acutely uncomfortable.

Not facing a fire doesn't put it out.

Friends are God's way of apologizing to us for our families

Once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle, you are equipped with the basic means of salvation.

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.

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

Guessing isn't knowing.

To change is to live, to live is to change, and not to change is to die.

It's hard enough for me to write what I want to write without me trying to write what you say they want me to write which I don't want to write.

Being disappointed is one thing and being discouraged is something else. I am disappointed but I am not discouraged.

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

You can be young without money but you can't be old without it.

There are no 'good' or 'bad' people. Some are a little better or a little worse, but all are activated more by misunderstanding than malice. A blindness to what is going on in each other's hearts.

I have always been pushed by the negative. The apparent failure of a play sends me back to my typewriter that very night, before the reviews are out. I am more compelled to get back to work than if I had a success.

If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels.

The human heart would never pass the drunk test.... If you took the human heart out of the human body and put a pair of legs on it and told it to walk a straight line, it couldn't do it.

Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going.

Death is one moment, and life is so many of them.

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

Don't you think there is always something unspoken between two people?

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

I try to work every day because you have no refuge but writing. When you're going through a period of unhappiness, a broken love affair, the death of someone you love, or some other disorder in your life, then you have no refuge but writing.

An artist must believe in himself - Possibly not so passionately as Lawrence - but passionately. Your belief is contagious. Others say - He is vain - but they are affected.

If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it.

The scene is memory and is therefore nonrealistic. Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart.

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.

Luck is believing you're lucky.

Talent? What is talent but the ability to get away with something?

Men don't want anything they get too easy. But on the other hand, men lose interest quickly.

Life is an unanswered question, but let's still believe in the dignity and importance of the question.

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!

I am more faithful than I intended to be!

We lose the magic whenever we stop telling our story and begin to wonder how we're doing, if we're selling it, if the listener likes us. Just tell the story and go on to the next one. All of us are full of stories the world might want to hear.

Some mystery should be left in the revelation of character in a play, just as a great deal of mystery is always left in the revelation of character in life, even in one's own character to himself.

Blanche: No, I have the misfortune of being an English instructor. I attempt to instill a bunch of bobby-soxers and drugstore Romeos with a reverence for Hawthorne and Whitman and Poe!

We have to distrust each other. It is our only defense against betrayal.

I don't believe in villains or heroes, only in right or wrong ways that individuals are taken, not by choice, but by necessity or by certain still uncomprehended influences in themselves, their circumstances and their antecedents.

I gave up visiting my psychoanalyst because he was meddling too much in my private life.

Deliberate cruelty is unforgivable. --Blanche Dubois

When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I'm only really alive when I'm writing.

We are all civilized people, wich means that we are all savages at heart but observing a few amenities of civilized behaviour.

And funerals are pretty compared to deaths.

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

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

Make voyages. Attempt them. There's nothing else.

Enthusiasm is the most important thing in life.

William Saroyan wrote a great play on this theme, that purity of heart is the one success worth having. "In the time of your life--live!" That time is short and it doesn't return again. It is slipping away while I write this and while you read it, and the monosyllable of the clock is Loss, loss, loss, unless you devote your heart to its opposition.

It is planned speeches that contain lies or dissimulations, not what you blurt out so spontaneously in one instant.

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.

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?