Tennessee Williams

“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.”

“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.”

“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, the 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 the little vanities and laxities that Success is heir to--why, then with this knowledge you are at least in a position of knowing where the danger lies.”

“People go to the movies instead of moving.”

“It was useless trying to explain to Cecila that poetry wasn't a commodity, that it could never be bought or sold, that it was, in fact, unteansferrable, remaining forever a part of the one who wrote it.”

“Anything might have been anything else and had as much meaning to it.”

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

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

“The future is called "perhaps", which is the only possible thing to call the future. And the only important thing is not to allow that to scare you.”

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

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

“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.”

“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?”

“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")”

“This was a respect in which he paid due homage to the wise old spirit of the late Emiel Kroger, that romantically practical Teuton who used to murmur to Pablo, between sleeping and waking, a sort of incantation that went like his: Sometimes you will find it and other times you won't find it and the times you don't find it are the times when you have got to be careful. Those are the times when you have got to remember that other times you will find it, not this time but the next time, or the time after that, and then you've got to be able to go home without it, yes, those times are the times when you have got to be able to go home without it, go home alone without it...”

“But nothing happened there now of a nature to provoke a disturbance. There were no complaints to the management or the police, and the dark glory of the upper galleries was a legend in such memories as that of the late Emiel Kroger and the present Pablo Gonzales, and one by one, of course, those memories died out and the legend died out with them. Places like the Joy Rio and the legends about them make one more than usually aware of the short bloom and the long fading out of things. ("The Mysteries of the Joy Rio")”

“It's like a switch, clickin' off in my head. Turns the hot light off and the cool one on, and all of a sudden there's peace.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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”

“Nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own egos. That is the way we all see ...each other in life. 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. That's how it is in all living relationships except when there is that rare case of two people who love intensely enough to burn through all those layers of opacity and see each other's naked hearts.”

“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.”

“Life that winter in Rome: a golden dream, and I don't mean Rafaello and the mimosa and the total freedom of life. Stop there: What I do mean is the total freedom of life and Rafaello and the mimosa and the letto matrimoniale and the Frascati when morning work was over.”

“Is a lifetime long enough to hold the regret that I have for that fantastically aborted but crazily sweet love affair?”

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

“Well, honey, a shot never does a coke any harm!”

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

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

“Young, gifted, and destitute...”

“Since that day, when people have spoken to me of "genius", I have felt the inside pocket to make sure my wallet's still there.”

“Don't you understand? I was PROCURING for him.”

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

“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...”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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. Don't maul, don't suffer, don't groan till the first draft is finished. A play is a pheonix and it dies a thousand deaths. Usually at night. In the morning it springs up again from its ashes and crows like a happy rooster. It is never as bad as you think, it is never as good. It is somewhere in between, and success or failure depends on which end of your emotional gamut concerning its value it approaches more closely. But it is much more likely to be good if you think it is wonderful while you are writing the first draft. An artist must believe in himself. Your belief is contagious. Others may say he is vain, but they are affected.”

“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!”

“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.”

“Enthusiasm is the most important thing in life.”

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

“Go, then! Go to the moon-you selfish dreamer!”

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

“The cities swept about me like dead leaves, leaves that were brightly colored but torn away from the branches. I would have stopped, but I was pursued by something. It always came upon me unawares, taking me altogether by surprise. Perhaps it was a familiar bit of music. Perhaps it was only a piece of transparent glass.”

“I didn't go to the moon, I went much further—for time is the longest distance between two places”

“Every time you come in yelling that God damn "Rise and Shine!" "Rise and Shine!" I say to myself, "How lucky dead people are!”

“--- 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 ...[More croquet sounds]Later tonight I'm going to tell you I love you an' maybe by that time you'll be drunk enough to believe me. Yes, they're playing croquet ...Big Daddy is dying of cancer ...What were you thinking of when I caught you looking at me like that? Were you thinking of Skipper?[Brick crosses to the bar, takes a quick drink, and rubs his head with a towel]Laws of silence don't work ...When something is festering in your memory or your imagination, laws of silence don't work, it's like shutting a door and locking it on a house on fire in hope of forgetting that the house is burning. But not facing a fire doesn't put it out. Silence about a thing just magnifies it. It grows and festers in silence, becomes malignant ....Get dressed, Brick.”

“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.”