Top 280 Tennessee Williams Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 3 of 6

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

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

104. “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

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

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

108. “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

109. “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

110. “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

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

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

115. “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

116. “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

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

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

122. “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

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

— Tennessee Williams

124. “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

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

— Tennessee Williams

126. “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

127. “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

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

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

130. “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

131. “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

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

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

134. “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

135. “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

136. “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

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

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

139. “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

140. “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

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

— Tennessee Williams

142. “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

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

— Tennessee Williams

144. “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

145. “You take it for granted that I am in something that I want to get out of.”

— Tennessee Williams

146. “I’m not good. I don’t know why people have to pretend to be good, nobody’s good.”

— Tennessee Williams

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

— Tennessee Williams

148. “Blanche: No, I have the misfortune of being an English instructor. I attempt to instill a bunch of bobby-soxers and drugstore Romeos with a reverence for Hawthorne and Whitman and Poe!”

— Tennessee Williams

149. “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?”

— Tennessee Williams

150. “And so tonight we’re going to make the lie true, and when that’s done, I’ll bring the liquor back here and we’ll get drunk together, here, tonight, in this place that death has come into...”

— Tennessee Williams