100 Inspiring Quotes By Tennessee Williams That Will Fill Your Life With New Gusto

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

  

Time is the longest distance between two places.

Time

  

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.

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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.

Time , Yourself

  

Time doesn't take away from friendship, nor does separation.

Time

  

A prayer for the wild at heart kept in cages.

  

How beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken.

  

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?

  

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

  

Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.

Life

  

There's a time for departure even when there's no certain place to go.

Time

  

I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.

  

All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.

  

In memory, everything seems to happen to music.

Music

  

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.

  

Make voyages. Attempt them. There's nothing else.

  

You can be young without money, but you can't be old without it.

  

Deliberate cruelty is unforgivable. --Blanche Dubois

  

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

Think

  

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.

Never

  

The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.

  

We're all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.

Life

  

I don't want realism. I want magic!

  

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!

  

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...

  

I didn't go to the moon, I went much further—for time is the longest distance between two places

Time

  

Every time you come in yelling that God damn "Rise and Shine!" "Rise and Shine!" I say to myself, "How lucky dead people are!

Time

  

Oh, you can't describe someone you're in love with!

  

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

  

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.

Past

  

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.

Never

  

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?

  

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

  

Show me a person who hasn´t known any sorrow and I´ll show you a superficial.

Me

  

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

  

Everybody is nothing until you love them.

  

Friends are God's way of apologizing to us for our families

  

Success and failure are equally disastrous.

  

Why is it so damn hard for people to talk?

  

For nowadays the world is lit by lightning! Blow out your candles, Laura -- and so goodbye. . . .

  

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

  

Life is an unanswered question, but let's still believe in the dignity and importance of the question.

Life

  

Mendacity is a system that we live in," declares Brick. "Liquor is one way out an'death's the other.

  

I'm not living with you. We occupy the same cage. (Maggie)

  

Go, then! Go to the moon-you selfish dreamer!

  

Well, honey, a shot never does a coke any harm!

Never

  

I cannot write any sort of story unless there is at least one character in it for whom I have physical desire.

Character

  

People go to the movies instead of moving.

  

Enthusiasm is the most important thing in life.

Life

  

Has it ever struck you that life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quick you hardly catch it going?

Life

  

I can't stand a naked light bulb, any more than I can a rude remark or a vulgar action.

  

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

  

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.

Time

  

And funerals are pretty compared to deaths.

  

Val: Why do you go out there? Sandra: Because dead people give such good advice. Val: What advice do they give? Sandra: Just one word- live!

  

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

  

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!

Me

  

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

Life

  

Hell is yourself and the only redemption is when a person puts himself aside to feel deeply for another person.

Yourself

  

The future is called "perhaps", which is the only possible thing to call the future. And the only important thing is not to allow that to scare you.

  

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.

Me

  

She lives in a world of her own – a world of – little glass ornaments…

  

When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I'm only really alive when I'm writing.

  

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

  

Maggie, we're through with lies and liars in this house. Lock the door.

  

We've had this date with each other from the beginning.

  

Never inside, I didn't lie in my heart...

Never

  

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

  

I don't want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic. I try to give that to people. I do misrepresent things. I don't tell truths. I tell what ought to be truth.

  

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

  

Attempting to find in motion what was lost in space.

  

We have to distrust each other. It's our only defense against betrayal.

  

It's like a switch, clickin' off in my head. Turns the hot light off and the cool one on, and all of a sudden there's peace.

Like , Peace

  

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.

Time

  

My only point, the only point that I'm making, is life has got to be allowed to continue even after the dream of life is--all--over....

Life

  

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

  

But here there was only hot swing music and liquor, dance halls, ban, and movies, and sex that hung in the gloom like a chandelier and flooded the world with brief, deceptive rainbows.

Like , Music

  

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

  

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

  

Being disappointed is one thing and being discouraged is something else.

  

Somebody said once or wrote, once: 'We're all of us children in a vast kindergarten trying to spell God's name with the wrong alphabet blocks!

Trying

  

There is only one true aristocracy . . . and that is the aristocracy of passionate souls!

  

Living with someone you love can be lonelier than living entirely alone, if the one that you love doesn't love you.

  

I saw that it was all over, put away in a box like a doll no longer cared for, the magical intimacy of our childhood together

Like , Together

  

Stella: And when he comes back I cry on his lap like a baby.. [she smiles to herself] Blanche: I guess that is what is meant by being in love..

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

  

Young, gifted, and destitute...

  

Nobody knew my rose of the world but me... I had too much glory. They don't want glory like that in nobody's heart

Like

  

It's interesting, isn't it? . . . the chandelier . . . it reminds me of mushroom soup.

Me

  

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?

Time

  

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

  

Stanley: Delicate piece she is. Stella: She is. She was. You didn't know Blanche as a girl. Nobody, nobody, was tender and trusting as she was. But people like you abused her, and forced her to change.

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I'll be all right in a minute, I'm just bewildered - by life...

  

-You're simple, straightforward and honest, a little bit on the primitive side, I should think. To interest you a woman would have to... -To lay her cards out on the table.

Think

  

No, truth is something desperate, an' she's got it. Believe me, it's something desperate, an' she's got it.

Me

  

Symbols are nothing but the natural speech of drama.

  

A drinking man's someone who wants to forget he isn't still young and believing

  

Possess your soul in patience - you will see!

  

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

  

Openings come quickly, sometimes, like blue space in running clouds. A complete overcast, then a blaze of light....

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