Top 280 Tennessee Williams Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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.”

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

55. “Death is one moment, and life is so many of them.”

— Tennessee Williams

56. “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.”

— Tennessee Williams

57. “All good art is an indiscretion.”

— Tennessee Williams

58. “I respect a person that has had to fight and howl for his decency.”

— Tennessee Williams

59. “Life has got to go on. No matter what happens, you’ve got to keep on going.”

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

61. “The object of art is to make eternal the desperately fleeting moment.”

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

63. “Men don’t want anything they get too easy. But on the other hand, men lose interest quickly.”

— Tennessee Williams

64. “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!”

— Tennessee Williams

65. “Don’t you think there is always something unspoken between two people?”

— Tennessee Williams

66. “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.”

— Tennessee Williams

67. “But since I have a poet’s weakness for symbols, I am using this character also as a symbol; he is the long-delayed but always expected something that we live for.”

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

69. “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... Nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own egos. That is the way we all see each other in life.”

— Tennessee Williams

70. “A man, when he burns, leaves only a handful of ashes. No woman can hold him. The wind must blow him away.”

— Tennessee Williams

71. “Everybody is nothing until you love them.”

— Tennessee Williams

72. “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.”

— Tennessee Williams

73. “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.”

— Tennessee Williams

74. “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.”

— Tennessee Williams

75. “Success and failure are equally disastrous.”

— Tennessee Williams

76. “To be free is to have achieved your life.”

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

78. “Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental. It is not realistic.”

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

80. “People go to the movies instead of moving.”

— Tennessee Williams

81. “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?”

— Tennessee Williams

82. “Guessing isn’t knowing.”

— Tennessee Williams

83. “Just another four-letter word.”

— Tennessee Williams

84. “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.”

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

86. “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.”

— Tennessee Williams

87. “Devils can be driven out of the heart by the touch of a hand on a hand, or a mouth on a mouth.”

— Tennessee Williams

88. “Hysteria is a natural phenomenon, the common denominator of the female nature. It’s the female weapon and the test of a man is his ability to cope with it.”

— Tennessee Williams

89. “If you can’t be yourself, what’s the point of being anyone else?”

— Tennessee Williams

90. “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.”

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

92. “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?”

— Tennessee Williams

93. “The world is a funny paper read backwards. And that way it isn’t so funny.”

— Tennessee Williams

94. “All of us are guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.”

— Tennessee Williams

95. “Once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle, you are equipped with the basic means of salvation.”

— Tennessee Williams

96. “I try to work every day because you have no refuge but writing. When you’re going through a period of unhappiness, a broken love affair, the death of someone you love, or some other disorder in your life, then you have no refuge but writing.”

— Tennessee Williams

97. “Marriage is an economic arrangement in many ways, let’s face it.”

— Tennessee Williams

98. “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?”

— Tennessee Williams

99. “The most dangerous word in any human tongue is the word for brother. It’s inflammatory.”

— Tennessee Williams

100. “I want to rest. I want to breathe quietly again.”

— Tennessee Williams