Tennessee Williams Quotes

Tennessee Williams delivers vivid, lyrical reflections on love, regret, and the masks we wear.

65 quotes

1. When I look back at Stairs to the Roof... I see its faults very plainly, as plainly as you may see them, but still I do not feel apologetic about this play. Unskilled and awkward as I was at this initial period of my playwriting, I certainly had a moral ernestness which I cannot boast of today, and I think that moral ernestness is a good thing for any times, but particularly for these times. I wish I still had the idealistic passion of Benjamin Murphy! You may smile as I do at the sometimes sophomoric aspect of his excitement, but I hope you will respect, as I do, the purity of his feeling and the honest concern which he had in his heart for the basic problem of mankind, which is to dignify our lives with a certain freedom.

2. I never saw a more beautiful woman, enormous eyes, skin the color of Devonshire cream.

3. 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.

4. A Prayer for the Wild at Heart That Are Kept in Cages

5. In memory everything seems to happen to music.

6. 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.

7. Animals have sections in their stomachs which enable them to digest food without mastication, but human beings are supposed to chew their food before they swallow it down: So chew your food and give your salivary glands a chance to function!

8. Mother, when you're disappointed, you get that awful suffering look on your face, like the picture of Jesus' mother in the museum!

9. 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?

10. Why you're not crippled, you just have a little defect - hardly noticeable, even! When people have some slight disadvantage like that, they cultivate other things to make up for it - develop charm - and vivacity - and - charm!

11. I took that horrible novel back to the library - yes! That hideous book by that insane Mr. Lawrence. I cannot control the output of diseased minds or people who cater to them - BUT I WON'T ALLOW SUCH FILTH BROUGHT INTO MY HOUSE! No, no, no, no, no!

12. Every time you come in yelling that God damn 'Rise and Shine!' 'Rise and Shine!' I say to myself, 'How lucky dead people are!'

13. Man is by instinct a lover, a hunter, a fighter, and none of those instincts are given much play at the warehouse!

14. 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!

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

16. 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!

17. All of my gentlemen callers were sons of planters and of course I assumed that I would be married to one and raise my family on a large piece of land with plenty of servants. But man proposes - and woman accepts the proposal! - To vary that old, old saying a little bit - I married no planter! I married a man who worked for the telephone company!

18. Shakespeare probably wrote a poem on that light bill, Mrs. Wingfield.

19. I believe in the future of television! I wish to be ready to go up right along with it. Therefore I'm planning to get in on the ground floor. In fact I've already made the right connections and all that remains is for the industry itself to get under way! Full steam - Knowledge - Zzzzzp! Money - Zzzzzp! - Power!

20. I'll just imagine he had an operation. The horn was removed to make him feel less - freakish! Now he will feel more at home with the other horses, the ones that don't have horns:

21. I wish you were my sister. I'd teach you to have some confidence in yourself. The different people are not like other people, but being different is nothing to be ashamed of. Because other people are not such wonderful people. They're one hundred times one thousand. You're one times one! They walk all over the earth. You just stay here. They're common as - weeds, but - you - well, you're - Blue Roses!

22. Things have a way of turning out so badly.

23. You don't know things anywhere! You live in a dream; you manufacture illusions!

24. Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be! I reach for a cigarette, I cross the street, I run into the movies or a bar, I buy a drink, I speak to the nearest stranger - anything that can blow your candles out! - for nowadays the world is lit by lightning! Blow out your candles Laura - and so goodbye:

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

26. I know this place. ... Here it is on the chart. Look, it says here: 'Continue until you come to the square of a walled town which is the end of the Camino Real and the beginning of the Camino Real. Halt there,' it says, 'and turn back, Traveler, for the spring of humanity has gone dry in this place...

27. You said, 'They're harmless dreamers and they're loved by the people.' - 'What,' I asked you, 'is harmless about a dreamer, and what,' I asked you, 'is harmless about the love of the people? - Revolution only needs good dreamers who remember their dreams.'

28. What's that smell in this room? Didn't you notice it Brick? Didn't you notice a powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity in this room? ... There ain't nothin' more powerful than the odor of mendacity ... You can smell it. It smells like death.

29. You said it yourself Big Daddy, mendacity is a system we live in.

30. What is your level? Tell me, so I can sink or rise to it.

31. One man has one great good true thing in his life. One great good thing which is true! I had friendship with Skipper. You are namin' it dirty!

32. I'm not living with you! We occupy the same cage, that's all.

33. Maggie: I'll win, alright. Brick: Win what? What is the victory of a cat on a hot tin roof? Maggie: Just staying on it, I guess. As long as she can.

34. Nothing's more determined than a cat on a hot tin roof. Is there? Is there, baby?

35. 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.

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

37. Nothing human disgusts me unless it's unkind.

38. “Nothing human disgusts me unless its unkind”

39. 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?

40. 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.

41. They chatter together like birds on Cypress Hill, but all they say is 'Live, live, live, live, live!' It's all they've learned, it's the only advice they can give.

42. You take it for granted that I am in something that I want to get out of.

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

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

45. Most of the confidence which I appear to feel, especially when influenced by noon wine, is only a pretense.

46. I cannot write any sort of story unless there is at least one character in it for whom I have physical desire.

47. 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.

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

49. Not facing a fire doesn't put it out.

50. I don't want realism. I want magic!

51. For nowadays the world is lit by lightning! Blow out your candles, Laura -- and so goodbye. . . .

52. What on earth can you do on this earth but catch at whatever comes near you, with both your fingers, until your fingers are broken?

53. 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.

54. The rest of my days I'm going to spend on the sea. And when I die, I'm going to die on the sea. You know what I shall die of? I shall die of eating an unwashed grape. One day out on the ocean I will die--with my hand in the hand of some nice looking ship's doctor, a very young one with a small blond moustache and a big silver watch. "Poor lady," they'll say, "The quinine did her no good. That unwashed grape has transported her soul to heaven.

55. And so tonight we're going to make the lie true, and when that's done, I'll bring the liquor back here and we'll get drunk together, here, tonight, in this place that death has come into...

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

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

58. My '60s plays were as good as most of the other plays I've written ... except I wasn't in a condition to refine them, to help in the rehearsal, or do anything. I was hardly conscious of what was going on except during the hours of the day when I was actually writing ... and that was with the aid of speed.

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

60. Oh, Jacques, we're used to each other, we're a pair of captive hawks caught in the same cage, and so we've grown used to each other. That's what passes for love at this dim, shadowy end of the Camino Real.

61. I'm tired and it's taking an increasing amount out of me, more than I have to give physically. And that's why I want to move to Sicily and buy that little farm and raise a flock of goats and geese. I find it peaceful ... and it would be a nice way to end life.

62. Why, man alive, Laura! Just look about you a little. What do you see? A world full of common people! All of 'em born and all of em' going to die! Which of them has one-tenth of your good points! Or mine! Or anyone else's, as far as that goes - gosh! Everybody excels in some one thing. Some in many!

63. Well, honey, a shot never does a coke any harm!

64. 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!

65. Enthusiasm is the most important thing in life.