Top 280 Tennessee Williams Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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.”

— Tennessee Williams

102. “Revolution begins in putting on bright colors.”

— Tennessee Williams

103. “I am more faithful than I intended to be!”

— Tennessee Williams

104. “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 light on something that had always been half in shadow, that’s how it struck the world for me.”

— Tennessee Williams

105. “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.”

— Tennessee Williams

106. “All creative work, all life in a sense, is a cri de coeur.”

— Tennessee Williams

107. “Come on, indulge yourself. You got nothing to lose that won’t be lost.”

— Tennessee Williams

108. “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.”

— Tennessee Williams

109. “I don’t want realism, I want magic! Yes, yes, magic!”

— Tennessee Williams

110. “Later tonight am going to tell you that I love you and maybe by that time you will be drunk enough to believe me.”

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

112. “We mustn’t scream at each other, the walls in this house have ears...”

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

114. “The work of a writer, his continuing work, depends for breath of life on a certain privacy of heart.”

— Tennessee Williams

115. “All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent.”

— Tennessee Williams

116. “Perhaps the most vivid recollection of my youth is that of the local wheelmen, led by my father, stopping at our home to eat pone, sip mint juleps, and flog the field hands. This more than anything cultivated my life-long aversion to bicycles.”

— Tennessee Williams

117. “Everything diminishes with time, my darling, but my feelings for certain people pierce me daily, and it is no illusion that they center me and let me know who I am, and let me know that I have loved and have been loved, no matter how badly or clumsily.”

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

119. “I like you to be exactly the way that you are, because in all my experience, I have never known anyone like you.”

— Tennessee Williams

120. “To know me is not to love me. At.”

— Tennessee Williams

121. “Man is by instinct a lover, a hunter, a fighter, and none of those instincts are given much play at the warehouse!”

— Tennessee Williams

122. “But there are things that happen between a man and a woman in the dark – that sort of make everything else seem – unimportant.”

— Tennessee Williams

123. “Glass breaks so easily. No matter how careful you are.”

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

125. “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.”

— Tennessee Williams

126. “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...”

— Tennessee Williams

127. “Girls that aren’t cut out for business careers usually wind up married to some nice man.”

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

130. “Keep awake, alive, new. Perform the paradox of being hard and yet soft. Survive without calcification of the tender membranes. Be a poet. Be alive.”

— Tennessee Williams

131. “Oh, you can’t describe someone you’re in love with!”

— Tennessee Williams

132. “A fire smokes the most when you start pouring water on it.”

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

134. “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...”

— Tennessee Williams

135. “Time rushes towards us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation.”

— Tennessee Williams

136. “And funerals are pretty compared to deaths.”

— Tennessee Williams

137. “When something is Festering on your memory or in your imagination, laws of silence don’t work, it’s just 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...”

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

139. “Ignorance – of mortality – is a comfort. A man don’t have that comfort, he’s the only living thing that conceives of death, that knows what it is.”

— Tennessee Williams

140. “A fragile, unearthly prettiness has come out in Laura: she is like a piece of translucent glass touched by light, given a momentary radiance, not actual, not lasting.”

— Tennessee Williams

141. “I am not a Polack. People from Poland are Poles, not Polacks. But what I am is one-hundred-per-cent American, born and raised in the greatest country on earth and proud as hell of it, so don’t ever call me a Polack.”

— Tennessee Williams

142. “I can’t expose a human weakness on the stage unless I know it through having it myself.”

— Tennessee Williams

143. “He was a telephone man who fell in love with long distance.”

— Tennessee Williams

144. “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.”

— Tennessee Williams

145. “Luxury is the wolf at the door and its fangs are the vanities and conceits germinated by success. When an artist learns this, he knows where the danger is.”

— Tennessee Williams

146. “We lose the magic whenever we stop telling our story and begin to wonder how we’re doing, if we’re selling it, if the listener likes us. Just tell the story and go on to the next one. All of us are full of stories the world might want to hear.”

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

148. “I never met a woman that didn’t know if she was good-looking or not without being told, and some of them give themselves credit for more than they’ve got.”

— Tennessee Williams

149. “Sorrow makes for sincerity, I think.”

— Tennessee Williams

150. “BLANCHE: You see I still have that awful vanity about my looks even now that my looks are slipping!”

— Tennessee Williams