Top 280 Tennessee Williams Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

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

— Tennessee Williams

153. “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

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

— Tennessee Williams

155. “Only some radical change can divert the downward course of my spirit, some startling new place or people to arrest the drift, the drag.”

— Tennessee Williams

156. “I don’t ask for your pity, but just your understanding – no, not even that -no. Just for your recognition of me in you, and the enemy, time, in us all.”

— Tennessee Williams

157. “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

158. “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.”

— Tennessee Williams

159. “I’m starting to boil inside. I know I seem dreamy, but inside-well, I’m boiling! Whenever I pick up a shoe, I shudder a little thinking how short life is and what I am doing!”

— Tennessee Williams

160. “I know I fib a good deal. After all, a woman’s charm is fifty per cent illusion, but when a thing is important I tell the truth. – Blanche Scene II.”

— Tennessee Williams

161. “I don’t believe in villains or heroes, only in right or wrong ways that individuals are taken, not by choice, but by necessity or by certain still uncomprehended influences in themselves, their circumstances and their antecedents.”

— Tennessee Williams

162. “The last we heard of him was a picture postcard from Mazatlan, on the Pacific coast of Mexico, containing a message of two words: “Hello – Goodbye!” and no address.”

— Tennessee Williams

163. “Youth must be wanton, youth must be quick, Dance to the candle while lasteth the wick.”

— Tennessee Williams

164. “At the age of fourteen I discovered writing as an escape from a world of reality in which I felt acutely uncomfortable.”

— Tennessee Williams

165. “Things have a way of turning out so badly.”

— Tennessee Williams

166. “Personal lyricism is the outcry of prisoner to prisoner from the cell in solitary where each is confined for the duration of his life.”

— Tennessee Williams

167. “When you look at a piece of delicately spun glass you think of two things: how beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken.”

— Tennessee Williams

168. “Some mystery should be left in the revelation of character in a play, just as a great deal of mystery is always left in the revelation of character in life, even in one’s own character to himself.”

— Tennessee Williams

169. “I don’t think there is such a thing as a precise sexual orientation. I think we’re all ambiguous sexually.”

— Tennessee Williams

170. “If people behaved in the same way nations do they would all be put in straitjackets.”

— Tennessee Williams

171. “I know all about the tyranny of women.”

— Tennessee Williams

172. “I am running away but I prefer to call it a strategic retreat.”

— Tennessee Williams

173. “The rest of my days I’m going to spend on the sea. And when I die, I’m going to die on the sea. You know what I shall die of? I shall die of eating an unwashed grape. One day out on the ocean I will die – with my hand in the hand of some nice looking ship’s doctor, a very young one with a small blond moustache and a big silver watch. “Poor lady,” they’ll say, “The quinine did her no good. That unwashed grape has transported her soul to heaven.”

— Tennessee Williams

174. “Life is important. There is nothing to hold onto. A man that drinks is throwing his life away. Don’t do it, hold on to your life. There is nothing else to hold on to...”

— Tennessee Williams

175. “A woman’s charm is fifty percent illusion.”

— Tennessee Williams

176. “He is the long-delayed but always expected something that we live for.”

— Tennessee Williams

177. “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.”

— Tennessee Williams

178. “Time is short and it doesn’t return again. It is slipping away while I write this and while you read it, and the monosyllable of the clock is Loss, Loss, Loss, unless you devote your heart to its opposition.”

— Tennessee Williams

179. “Nothing’s more determined than a cat on a hot tin roof...”

— Tennessee Williams

180. “Monsters don’t die early; they hang on long. Awfully long. Their vanity’s infinite, almost as infinite as their disgust with themselves.”

— Tennessee Williams

181. “Let’s go down and swim in that liquid moonlight.”

— Tennessee Williams

182. “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?”

— Tennessee Williams

183. “In human character, simplicity doesn’t exist except among simpletons.”

— Tennessee Williams

184. “And in the spring, it’s touching to notice them making their first discovery of love! As if nobody had ever known it before!”

— Tennessee Williams

185. “Bohemia has no banner. It survives by discretion.”

— Tennessee Williams

186. “A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with.”

— Tennessee Williams

187. “There is no pleasure in the world like writing well and going fast. It’s like nothing else. It’s like a love affair, it goes on and on, and doesn’t end in marriage. It’s all courtship.”

— Tennessee Williams

188. “I have always been more interested in creating a character that contains something crippled. I think nearly all of us have some kind of defect.”

— Tennessee Williams

189. “I will read long books and the journals of dead writers. I will feel closer to them than I ever felt to people I used to know before I withdrew from the world. It will be sweet and cool this friendship of mine with dead poets, for I won’t have to touch them or answer their questions. They will talk to me and not expect me to answer. And I’ll get sleepy listening to their voices explaining the mysteries to me. I’ll fall asleep with the book still in my fingers, and it will rain.”

— Tennessee Williams

190. “Talent? What is talent but the ability to get away with something?”

— Tennessee Williams

191. “I followed, from then on, in my father’s footsteps, attempting to find in motion what was lost in space.”

— Tennessee Williams

192. “The strongest influences in my life and my work are always whomever I love. Whomever I love and am with most of the time, or whomever I remember most vividly. I think that’s true of everyone, don’t you?”

— Tennessee Williams

193. “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.”

— Tennessee Williams

194. “Walls are built up between people a hell of a damn sight faster than – broken down.”

— Tennessee Williams

195. “Only animals have to satisfy instincts! Surely your aims are somewhat higher than theirs! Than monkeys! Pigs!”

— Tennessee Williams

196. “I’m a poet. And then I put the poetry in the drama. I put it in short stories, and I put it in the plays. Poetry’s poetry. It doesn’t have to be called a poem, you know.”

— Tennessee Williams

197. “I stayed and fought for it, bled for it, almost died for it.”

— Tennessee Williams

198. “You don’t know things anywhere! You live in a dream, you manufacture illusions!”

— Tennessee Williams

199. “I don’t think a married couple can go through life without laughs together any more than they can without tears.”

— Tennessee Williams

200. “You two had something that had to be kept on ice, yes, incorruptible, yes! – and death was the only icebox where you could keep it...”

— Tennessee Williams