A collection of quotes and thoughts by Tennessee Williams on angels, demons, distance, time, vanity, plays, writing, heart, life, love, fear, wild and ego.
100 Inspiring Quotes By Tennessee Williams That Will Fill Your Life With New Gusto
Tennessee Williams was an acclaimed American playwright known as the best playwrights of the 20th century. His childhood was very disturbed as a result of his dysfunctional family and this is where writing came to his rescue. These experiences were a great influence for majority of his works. He joined the University of Missouri to study journalism but was compelled by his father to become a sales clerk against his will. All this caused a nervous breakdown. After recovering, he completed his studies and moved to New Orleans to start a new life away from his family. During the initial years, he traveled to various places doing petty jobs to survive. He debuted on theater with his play titled ‘The Glass Menagerie’ which brought him instant fame as it was honored with ‘New York Critics Circle Awards’. His next play ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ further upped his success barometer. It was honored with various awards including the most renowned ‘Pulitzer Prize’. The next two decades marked the most successful time of his career as he gave consecutive hits. His promising career, unfortunately, came on a downfall as he got into alcohol and drugs. Here is a compilation of quotes and thoughts by the legendary playwright which have been extracted from his writings, plays, books, work and life. Go through these quotes sayings by Tennessee Williams which tends to have a lesson of life hidden behind them.
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.
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?
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
Make voyages. Attempt them. There's nothing else.
Tennessee Williams
You can be young without money, but you can't be old without it.
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.
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!
America has only three cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans.
Everywhere else is Cleveland.
Tennessee Williams
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.
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.
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.
Caged birds accept each other, but flight is what they long for.
Tennessee Williams
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.
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.
I'll be all right in a minute, I'm just bewildered - by life...
Tennessee Williams
-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.
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