Tennessee Williams famous quotes

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

#Love #Inspirational #Life

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

#Friendship #Doe #Separation

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

#Hate #Thinking #Hatred

For time is the longest distance between two places.
-- Tennessee Williams

#Time #Distance #Two

To be free is to have achieved your life.
-- Tennessee Williams

#Life #Live By #Life Changing

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

#Heart #Gay #Mountain

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

#History #Suffering #Looks

Success and failure are equally disastrous.
-- Tennessee Williams

#Success #Congratulations #Failure

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

#Memorial Day #Freedom #Long

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

#Life Lesson #Believe #Memorial

Everybody is nothing until you love them.
-- Tennessee Williams

Snatching the eternal out of the desperately fleeting is the great magic trick of human existence.
-- Tennessee Williams

#Magic #Fleeting #Eternity

You can be young without money but you can't be old without it.
-- Tennessee Williams

#Funny #Life #Motivational

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

#Grieving #Blood #Want

The nervous system of any age or nation is its creative workers, its artists. And if that nervous system is profoundly disturbed by its environment, the work it produces will inescapably reflect the disturbances, sometimes obliquely and sometimes with violent directness.
-- Tennessee Williams

#Artist #Creative #Age

Something in me will save me from utter ruin no matter what comes.
-- Tennessee Williams

#Ruins #Matter #Save Me

Revolution only needs good dreamers who remember their dreams.
-- Tennessee Williams

#Dream #Revolution #Needs

An artist must believe in himself. Your belief is contagious. Others may say he is vain, but they are affected.
-- Tennessee Williams

#Believe #Artist #May

You see, baby, after a glass or two of wine I’m inclined to extravagance.
-- Tennessee Williams

#Baby #Wine #Two

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

#Teaching #Writing #Men

We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.
-- Tennessee Williams

#Lonely #Loneliness #Skins

We have to distrust each other. It is our only defense against betrayal.
-- Tennessee Williams

#Truth #Betrayal #Defense

Don't you think there is always something unspoken between two people?
-- Tennessee Williams

#Thinking #People

I have always been pushed by the negative. The apparent failure of a play sends me back to my typewriter that very night, before the reviews are out. I am more compelled to get back to work than if I had a success.
-- Tennessee Williams

#Failure #Night #Typewriters

I try to work every day because you have no refuge but writing. When you're going through a period of unhappiness, a broken love affair, the death of someone you love, or some other disorder in your life, then you have no refuge but writing.
-- Tennessee Williams

#Writing #Broken #Trying

Make voyages. Attempt them. There's nothing else.
-- Tennessee Williams

#Inspirational #Courage #Travel

At the age of fourteen I discovered writing as an escape from a world of reality in which I felt acutely uncomfortable.
-- Tennessee Williams

#Writing #Reality #Age

Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.
-- Tennessee Williams

#Truth #Opposites #Giving

The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that's also a hypocrite!
-- Tennessee Williams

#Lying #Liars #Hypocrite

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.
-- Tennessee Williams

#Jobs #Doors #Office

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

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 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.
-- Tennessee Williams

#Girl #Boys #Discovery

The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.
-- Tennessee Williams

#Nature #Time #Flower

The object of art is to make eternal the desperately fleeting moment.
-- Tennessee Williams

#Art #Fleeting #Moments

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

#Writing #Alive

Take by surprise and the world gives up resistance.
-- Tennessee Williams

#Giving Up #World #Resistance

All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.
-- Tennessee Williams

#Truth #People #Cruelty

Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going.
-- Tennessee Williams

#Life #Inspiring #Memories

All of us are guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.
-- Tennessee Williams

#God #Meaningful #Work

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

#Inspirational #Change #Graduation

Enthusiasm is the most important thing in life.
-- Tennessee Williams

#Reality #Important #Enthusiasm

It is only in his work that an artist can find reality and satisfaction, for the actual world is less intense than the world of his invention and consequently his life, without recourse to violent disorder, does not seem very substantial. The right condition for him is that in which his work in not only convenient but unavoidable.
-- Tennessee Williams

#Reality #Artist #Doe

I am more faithful than I intended to be!
-- Tennessee Williams

#Faithful

Bohemia has no banner. It survives by discretion.
-- Tennessee Williams

#Banner #Discretion

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

#Regret #Men #Past

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

#Cat #Long #Victory

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.
-- Tennessee Williams

#Believe #Self #Doubt

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.
-- Tennessee Williams

#Suicide #Mirrors #Vanity

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

#Goodbye #Blow #World

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

#Death #Animal #Giving

The scene is memory and is therefore nonrealistic. Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart.
-- Tennessee Williams

#Memories #Heart #Emotional

attempting to find in motion what was lost in space.
-- Tennessee Williams

#Space #Lost #Attempting

I believe the way to write a good play is to convince yourself it is easy to do, then go ahead and do it with ease.
-- Tennessee Williams

#Believe #Writing #Play

Security is a kind of death.
-- Tennessee Williams

#Adventure #Kind #Security

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

#Love Is #Names #Language

Kill off all my demons and my angels might die too.
-- Tennessee Williams

#Angel #Might #Demon

All good art is an indiscretion.
-- Tennessee Williams

#Art #Good Art #Art Is

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

#Redemption #Hell #Feels

I can't expose a human weakness on the stage unless I know it through having it myself.
-- Tennessee Williams

#Theatre #Weakness #Stage

Of course you always had that detached quality as if you were playing a game without much concern over whether you won or lost, and now that you've lost the game, not lost but just quit playing, you have that rare sort of charm that usually only happens in very old or hopelessly sick people, the charm of the defeated.
-- Tennessee Williams

#Games #Sick #People

William Saroyan wrote a great play on this theme, that purity of heart is the one success worth having. "In the time of your life--live!" That 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

#Heart #Writing #Loss

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, like something gold you let go of--and I can! I'm determined to do it--and nothing's more determined than a cat on a tin roof--is there?
-- Tennessee Williams

#Beautiful #Letting Go #Giving Up

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

#New York #Cities #San Francisco

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

#Death #Time #Dying

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

#Light #Rude #Naked

In memory everything seems to happen to music.
-- Tennessee Williams

#Music #Memories #Recollection

Deliberate cruelty is unforgivable. --Blanche Dubois
-- Tennessee Williams

#Unforgivable #Cruelty #Dubois

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

#Character #Play #Theatre

All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent.
-- Tennessee Williams

#God #Atheism #Mythology

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

#Life #Reality #Grace

Once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle, you are equipped with the basic means of salvation.
-- Tennessee Williams

#Struggle #Mean #Salvation

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

#Angel #I Hate You #Demon

A prayer for the wild at heart kept in cages.
-- Tennessee Williams

#Prayer #Heart #Cages

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

#Lonely #Loneliness #Selfish

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.
-- Tennessee Williams

#Love #Dream #People

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

#Strong #Character #Hysteria

Symbols are nothing but the natural speech of drama.
-- Tennessee Williams

#Drama #Speech #Natural

Success is blocked by concentrating on it and planning for it... Success is shy - it won't come out while you're watching.
-- Tennessee Williams

#Inspirational #Motivational #Success

Life is partly what we make it, and partly what it is made by the friends we choose.
-- Tennessee Williams

#Life #Friendship #Birthday

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

#New Orleans #Hands #Long

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

#Nice #Ocean #Hands

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

#Fire #House #Looks