Top 280 Tennessee Williams Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I don’t want realism. I want magic!”

— Tennessee Williams

Featured in: Miracle Quotes, Impossible Quotes, Imagination Quotes, Crazy Quotes, Desire Quotes

2. “Time is the longest distance between two places.”

— Tennessee Williams

Featured in: Time Quotes, Distance Quotes

3. “Kill off all my demons and my angels might die too.”

— Tennessee Williams

4. “Luck is believing you’re lucky.”

— Tennessee Williams

Featured in: Luck Quotes

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

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

8. “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.”

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

10. “The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that’s also a hypocrite!”

— Tennessee Williams

11. “Make voyages. Attempt them. There’s nothing else.”

— Tennessee Williams

Featured in: Courage Quotes, Experience Quotes, Passion Quotes, Risk-Taking Quotes, Travel Quotes

12. “The only unforgivable sin is deliberate cruelty.”

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

Featured in: Quotes About New York

14. “The helpless can’t help the helpless.”

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

16. “To change is to live, to live is to change, and not to change is to die.”

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

18. “The world is violent and mercurial – it will have its way with you. We are saved only by love – love for each other and the love that we pour into the art we feel compelled to share: being a parent; being a writer; being a painter; being a friend. We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.”

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

20. “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.”

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

22. “You can be young without money but you can’t be old without it.”

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

Featured in: Betrayal Quotes

25. “Friends are God’s way of apologizing to us for our families.”

— Tennessee Williams

26. “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!”

— Tennessee Williams

27. “Enthusiasm is the most important thing in life.”

— Tennessee Williams

28. “Nobody sees anybody truly but only through the flaws of their own ego.”

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

32. “Security is a kind of death.”

— Tennessee Williams

33. “Revolution only needs good dreamers who remember their dreams.”

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

35. “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!”

— Tennessee Williams

36. “Deliberate cruelty is unforgivable. – Blanche Dubois.”

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

39. “Nothing human disgusts me unless it’s unkind.”

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

41. “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!”

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

44. “I think time is a merciless thing. I think life is a process of burning oneself out and time is the fire that burns you.”

— Tennessee Williams

45. “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.”

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

48. “Sometimes – there’s God – so quickly!”

— Tennessee Williams

49. “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...”

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams