Tennessee williams was one of the most influential american playwrights of the twentieth century. He is best known for his plays the glass menagerie and a streetcar named desire. Throughout his career, williams wrote and shared many memorable quotes that are still relevant today. These quotes reveal his creative genius and wisdom, as well as his deep understanding of human nature. In this article, we will explore some of tennessee williams’ most famous and inspiring quotes.
Tennessee Williams Quotes On Happiness And Humanity
💙 “A high station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace.” – Tennessee Williams
💙 “If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels.” – Tennessee Williams
💙 “Don’t look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you’ll know you’re dead.” – Tennessee Williams
“Success and failure are equally disastrous.” – Tennessee Williams
💙 “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
💙 “We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.” – Tennessee Williams
💙 “Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going.” – Tennessee Williams
💙 “For time is the longest distance between two places.” – Tennessee Williams
💙 “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” – Tennessee Williams
💙 “Life is partly what we make it, and partly what it is made by the friends we choose.” – Tennessee Williams
Tennessee Williams Quotes To Brighten Your Day
💙 “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
💙 “Enthusiasm is the most important thing in life.” – Tennessee Williams
“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.” – Tennessee Williams
💙 “There is a time for departure even when there’s no certain place to go.” – Tennessee Williams
💙 “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?” – Tennessee Williams
💙 “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
💙 “When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.” – Tennessee Williams
💙 “All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.” – Tennessee Williams
💙 “Hell is yourself and the only redemption is when a person puts himself aside to feel deeply for another person.” – Tennessee Williams
💙 “We have to distrust each other. It is our only defense against betrayal.” – Tennessee Williams
Tennessee Williams Quotes To Help You Better Understand His Mind
💙 “If I am no longer disturbed myself, I will deal less with disturbed people, but I don’t regret having concerned myself with them because I think most of us are disturbed.” – Tennessee Williams
💙 “You can be young without money but you can’t be old without it.” – Tennessee Williams
💙 “Luck is believing you’re lucky.” – Tennessee Williams
💙 “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
💙 “The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that’s also a hypocrite!” – Tennessee Williams
If you’re enjoying these quotes, make sure to read our collection of hypocrite quotes from famous writers and authors.
Tennessee Williams Famous Quotes
💙 “She lives in a world of her own – a world of – little glass ornaments…”
💙 “The cities swept about me like dead leaves, leaves that were brightly colored but torn away from the branches. I would have stopped, but I was pursued by something.”
💙 “People are not so dreadful when you know them. That’s what you have to remember!”
“Anything might have been anything else and had as much meaning to it.”
💙 “I suppose 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.”
💙 “Nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own egos. That is the way we all see …each other in life.”
💙 “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.”
💙 “Snatching the eternal out of the desperately fleeting is the great magic trick of human existence.”
💙 “All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.”
💙 “Don’t look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you’ll know you’re dead.”
💙 “Mendacity is a system that we live in.”
💙 “Success and failure are equally disastrous.”
💙 “All pretty girls are a trap, a pretty trap, and men expect them to be.”
💙 “People go to the movies instead of moving.”
💙 “For nowadays the world is lit by lightning!”
💙 “Don’t look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you’ll know you’re dead.”
💙 “Everybody has problems, not just you, but practically everybody has got some problems. You think of yourself as having the only problems, as being the only one who is disappointed.”
💙 ” All my life I have been haunted by the obsession that to desire a thing or to love a thing intensely is to place yourself in a vulnerable position, to be a possible, if not a probable, loser of what you most want.”
💙 “Perhaps it was a familiar bit of music. Perhaps it was only a piece of transparent glass.”
💙 “And funerals are pretty compared to deaths.”
💙 “We are all civilized people, which means that we are all savages at heart but observing a few amenities of civilized behaviour.”
💙 “A prayer for the wild at heart kept in cages. I know how you long to run wild and free.”
💙 “I can’t expose a human weakness on the stage unless I know it through having it myself.”
💙 “Time doesn’t take away from friendship, nor does separation.”
💙 “If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels.”
💙 “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.”
💙 “America has only three cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland.”
💙 “Friends are God’s way of apologizing to us for our families.”
Tennessee Williams Quotes On Love
💙 “We’ve had this date with each other from the beginning.”
💙 “It was like you suddenly turned a blinding on something that had always been half in shadow, that’s how it struck the world for me. But I was unlucky. Deluded.”
💙 “Everybody is nothing until you love them.”
💙 “The Venus flytrap, a devouring organism, aptly named for the goddess of love.”
💙 “Oh, you can’t describe someone you’re in love with!”
💙 “He was a boy, just a boy, when I was a very young girl. When I was sixteen, I made the discovery – love. All at once and much, much too completely.”
💙 “It is much easier to give money than love.”
💙 “We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.”
💙 “We’re all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.”
💙 “The world is violent and mercurial — it will have its way with you.”
💙 “That’s how it is in all living relationships except when there is that rare case of two people who love intensely enough to burn through all those layers of opacity and see each other’s naked hearts.”
💙 “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.”
💙 “Oh, you weak, beautiful people who give up with such grace. What you need is someone to take hold of you–gently, with love, and hand your life back to you…”
Famous Tennessee Williams Quotes From His Famous Plays
💙 “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….”
💙 “Physical beauty is passing – a transitory possession – but beauty of the mind, richness of the spirit, tenderness of the heart…”
💙 “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?”
💙 “Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician.”
💙 “Show me a person who hasn’t known any sorrow and I’ll show you a superficial.”
💙 “Caged birds accept each other but flight is what they long for.”
💙 “Guilt is universal.”
💙 “A woman’s charm is fifty per cent illusion.”
💙 “Silence about a thing just magnifies it.”
💙 “There ain’t nothin’ more powerful than the odor of mendacity…You can smell it. It smells like death.”
💙 “Only animals have to satisfy instincts!”
💙 “Morning can always be counted on to bring us back to a more realistic level.”
💙 “Nothing human disgusts me unless it’s unkind.”
💙 “Death commences too early–almost before you’re half acquainted with life–you meet the other.”
💙 “I respect a person that has had to fight and howl for his decency.”
💙 “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.”
💙 “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.”
💙 “I’ve got the guts to die. What I want to know is, have you got the guts to live?”
💙 “The most dangerous word in any human tongue is the word for brother. It’s inflammatory.”
💙 “Never inside, I didn’t lie in my heart.”
💙 “Memory takes a lot of poetic license.”
💙 “Every time you come in yelling that Goddamn “Rise and Shine! Rise and Shine!” I say to myself, “How lucky dead people are!”
💙 “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?”
💙 “How beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken.”
💙 “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.”
💙 “He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.”
💙 “But I get up. I go! For sixty-five dollars a month I give up all that I dream of doing and being ever!”
💙 “But just look around you and you will see lots of people as disappointed as you are.”
💙 “We are saved only by love — love for each other and the love that we pour into the art we feel compelled to share: being a parent; being a writer; being a painter; being a friend.”
💙 “I think that hate is a feeling that can only exist where there is no understanding.”
💙 “Make voyages. Attempt them. There’s nothing else.”
💙 “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.”
💙 “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?”
💙 “Go, then! Go to the moon-you selfish dreamer!”
💙 “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.”
💙 “Being disappointed is one thing and being discouraged is something else. I am disappointed but I am not discouraged.”
💙 “The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.”
💙 “I didn’t go to the moon, I went much further…”
💙 “Time is the longest distance between two places.”
💙 “There’s a time for departure even when there’s no certain place to go.”
💙 “When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.”
💙 “What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, its curved like a road through mountains.”
💙 “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”
💙 “In memory, everything seems to happen to music.”
💙 “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…”
💙 “The human animal is a beast that dies but the fact that he’s dying don’t give him pity for others.”
💙 “You can be young without money but you can’t be old without it.”
💙 “I don’t want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic.”
Tennessee Williams Quotes On Life
💙 “But I don’t think that anything that occurs in life should be omitted from art, though the artist should present it in a fashion that is artistic and not ugly.”
💙 “I don’t believe in ‘original sin’. I don’t believe in ‘guilt’. I don’t believe in villains or heroes – only right or wrong ways that individuals have taken…”
💙 “Enthusiasm is the most important thing in life.”
💙 “Dead people give such good advice.”
💙 “Time goes by so fast. Nothin’ can outrun it.”
💙 “Hell is yourself and the only redemption is when a person puts himself aside to feel deeply for another person.”
💙 “Hollywood characters are supposed to have all the adventures for everybody in America, while everybody in America sits in a dark room and watches them have them!”
💙 “Life is an unanswered question, but let’s still believe in the dignity and importance of the question.”
💙 “In the time of your life–live!” That time is short and it doesn’t return again.”
💙 “I set out to tell the truth. And sometimes the truth is shocking.”
💙 “Life is partly what we make it, and partly what it is made by the friends we choose.”
💙 “When I write I don’t aim to shock people, and I’m surprised when I do.”
💙 “I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.”
Verdict:
Tennessee williams’ quotes were thought-provoking, profound, and inspiring. His words have had a lasting impact on literature and culture, and will continue to inspire generations to come.