Tennessee Williams

“We're all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.”

“I don't want realism. I want magic!”

“Jim lights a cigarette and leans indolently back on his elbow smiling at Laura with a warmth and charm which lights her inwardly with altar candles.”

“To begin with, I turn back time. I reverse it to that quaint period, the thirties, when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had failed them, or they had failed their eyes, and so they were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy.”

“I know all about the tyranny of women.”

“he would die early, since nothing so fair could decline by common degrees in a faded season.”

“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”

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

“attempting to find in motion what was lost in space.”

“Q.Why don't you write about nice people? Haven't you ever known any nice people in your life?A.My theory about nice people is so simple that I am embarrassed to say it.Q.Please say it.A.Well, I've never met one that I couldn't love if I completely knew him and understood him, and in my work I have at least tried to arrive at knowledge and understanding.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.Why don't we meet these people and get to know them as I try to meet and know people in my plays?”

“Q.Do you have any positive message, in your opinion?A.Indeed I do think that I do.Q.Such as what?A.The crying, almost screaming, need of a great worldwide human effort to know ourselves and each other a great deal better, well enough to concede that no man has a monopoly on right or virtue any more than any man has a corner on duplicity and evil and so forth. If people, and races and nations, would start with that self-manifest truth, then I think that the world could sidestep the sort of corruption which I have involuntarily chosen as the basic, allegorical theme of my plays as a whole.”

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

“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.”

“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!”

“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.”

“It's interesting, isn't it? . . . the chandelier . . . it reminds me of mushroom soup.”

“I met her last summer on a moonlight boat trip...”

“The human animal is a beast that dies but the fact that he’s dying don’t give him pity for others.”

“All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.”

“How beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken.”

“Don't you just love those long rainy afternoons in New Orleans when an hour isn't just an hour - but a little piece of eternity dropped into your hands - and who knows what to do with it?”

“I don't want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don't tell the truth, I tell what ought to be the truth. And it that's sinful, then let me be damned for it!”

“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.”

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

“Symbols are nothing but the natural speech of drama.”

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

“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'm a rich man, Brick, yep, I'm a mighty rich man. Y'know how much I'm worth? Guess, Brick! Guess how much I'm worth! Close to ten million in cash an' blue chip stocks, outside, mind you, of twenty-eight thousand acres of the richest land this side of the valley Nile! But a man can't buy his life with it, he can't buy back his life with it when his life has been spent, that's one thing not offered in the Europe fire-sale or in the American markets or any markets on earth, a man can't buy his life with it, he can't buy back his life when his life is finished...Big Daddy: (pp. 65)”

“Success and failure are equally disastrous.”

“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?”

“You know, then that the public Somebody you are when you 'have a name' is a fiction created with mirrors and that the only somebody worth being is the solitary and unseen you that existed from your first breath”

“Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.”

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

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

“I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”

“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.”

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

“The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.”

“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?”

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

“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!”

“Then what is good? The obsessive interest in human affairs, plus a certain amount of compassion and moral conviction, that first made the experience of living something that must be translated into pigment or music or bodily movement or poetry or prose or anything that's dynamic and expressivee--that's what's good for you if you're at all serious in your aims. 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, the monosyllable of the clock is Loss, loss, loss, unless you devote your heart to its opposition.”

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

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

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

“I think no more than a week after I started writing I ran into the first block. It's hard to describe it in a way that will be understandable to anyone who is not a neurotic. I will try. All my life I have been haunted by the obsession that to desire a thing or to love a thing intensely is to place yourself in a vulnerable position, to be a possible, if not a probable, loser of what you most want. Let's leave it like that. That block has always been there and always will be, and my chance of getting, or achieving, anything that I long for will always be gravely reduced by the interminable existence of that block.”

“A prayer for the wild at heart kept in cages.”

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

“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.”

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