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.”

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

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

“A man like that is someone to go out with—once—twice—three times when the devil is in you. But live with? Have a child by?”

“CORNELIA: -Sit down. Don't leave the table.GRACE: -Is that an order?CORNELIA: -I don't give orders to you, I make requests.GRACE: -Sometimes the requests of an employer are hard to distinguish from orders. [She sits down]”

“Oh, you can't describe someone you're in love with!”

“He was a boy, just a boy, when I was a very young girl. When I was sixteen, I made the discovery - love. All at once and much, much too completely. It was like you suddenly turned a blinding on something that had always been half in shadow, that's how it struck the world for me. But I was unlucky. Deluded.”

“And funerals are pretty compared to deaths.”

“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.”

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

“Show me a person who hasn´t known any sorrow and I´ll show you a superficial.”

“I’m a poet. And then I put the poetry in the drama. I put it in short stories, and I put it in the plays. Poetry’s poetry. It doesn’t have to be called a poem, you know.”

“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.”

“In human character, simplicity doesn't exist except among simpletons.”

“One does not escape that easily from the seduction of an effete way of life. You cannot arbitrarily say to yourself, I will now continue my life as it was before this thing, Success, happened to me. But once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle you are equipped with the basic means of salvation. Once you know this is true, that the heart of man, his body and his brain, are forged in a white-hot furnace for the purpose of conflict (the struggle of creation) and that with the conflict removed, man is a sword cutting daisies, that not privation but luxury is the wolf at the door and that the fangs of this wolf are all little vanities and conceits and laxities that Success is heir to - why, then with this knowledge you are at least in a position to know where danger lies.”

“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.”

“So successfully have we disguised from ourselves the intensity of our own feelings, the sensibility of our own hearts, that plays in the tragic tradition have begun to seem untrue. For a couple of hours we may surrender ourselves to a world of fiercely illuminated values in conflict, but when the stage is covered and the auditorium lighted, almost immediately there is a recoil of disbelief. "Well, well!" we say as we shuffle back up the aisle, while the play dwindles behind us with the sudden perspective of an early Chirico painting. By the time we have arrived at Sardi's, if not as soon as we pass beneath the marquee, we have convinced ourselves once more that life has as little resemblance to the curiously stirring and meaningful occurrences on the stage as a jingle has to an elegy of Rilke.”

“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?”

“-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.”

“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!”

“I hope to die in my sleep, when the time comes, and I hope it will be in the beautiful big brass bed in my New Orleans apartment, the bed which is associated with so much love.”

“And then the searchlight which had been turned on the world was turned off again and never for one moment since has there been any light that's stronger than this-kitchen-candle...”

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

“I don't mean what other people mean when they speak of a home, because I don't regard a home as a...well, as a place, a building...a house...of wood, bricks, stone. I think of a home as being a thing that two people have between them in which each can...well, nest.”

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

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

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

“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”

“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.”

“Everybody is nothing until you love them.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I've got the guts to die. What I want to know is, have you got the guts to live?”

“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!”

“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..”

“The trouble with this world is that everybody has to compromise and conform.”

“When things don't change, their sameness becomes an accretion. That is why all society puts on flesh. Succumbs to the cubicles and begins to fill them.”

“Take by surprise and the world gives up resistance.”

“Revolution begins in putting on bright colors.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“The role of benefactor is worse than thankless, it's the role of a victim, Doctor, a sacrificial victim, yes, they want your blood, Doctor, they want your blood on the altar steps of their outraged, outrageous egos!”

“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?”

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

“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...”

“My head don't work any more and it's hard for me to understand how anybody could care if he lived or died or was dying or cared about anything but whether or not there was liquor left in the bottle and so I said what I said without thinking. In some ways I'm no better than the others, in some ways worse because I'm less alive. Maybe it's being alive that makes them lie, and being almost not alive that makes me sort of accidentally truthful--I don't know but--anyway--we've been friends...And being friends is telling each other the truth...”

“That Europe is nothin' on earth but a great big auction, that's all it is, that bunch of old worn-out places, it's just a big fire-sale, the whole rutten thing.”

“My only point, the only point that I'm making, is life has got to be allowed to continue even after the dream of life is--all--over....”