Tennessee Williams Quotes

162 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

Tennessee Williams
Whoever you are — I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.

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
In memory everything seems to happen to music.

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

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
Men don't want anything they get too easy. But on the other hand, men lose interest quickly.

Tennessee Williams
People are not so dreadful when you know them. That's what you have to remember! And 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. But just look around you and you will see lots of people as disappointed as you are.

Tennessee Williams
It haunts me, the passage of time. I think time is a merciless thing. I think life is a process of burning oneself out and time is the fire that burns you. But I think the spirit of man is a good adversary.

Tennessee Williams
A man, when he burns, leaves only a handful of ashes. No woman can hold him. The wind must blow him away.

Tennessee Williams
Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be! I reach for a cigarette, I cross the street, I run into the movies or a bar, I buy a drink, I speak to the nearest stranger — anything that can blow your candles out! — for nowadays the world is lit by lightning! Blow out your candles Laura — and so goodbye…

Tennessee Williams
We have to distrust each other. It's our only defence against betrayal.

Tennessee Williams
Mendacity is a system that we live in. Liquor is one way out an' death's the other.

Tennessee Williams
I know this place. … Here it is on the chart. Look, it says here: "Continue until you come to the square of a walled town which is the end of the Camino Real and the beginning of the Camino Real. Halt there," it says, "and turn back, Traveler, for the spring of humanity has gone dry in this place...

Tennessee Williams
But since I have a poet's weakness for symbols, I am using this character also as a symbol; he is the long-delayed but always expected something that we live for.

Tennessee Williams
Hysteria is a natural phenomenon, the common denominator of the female nature. It's the female weapon and the test of a man is his ability to cope with it.

Tennessee Williams
I know so well what becomes of unmarried women who aren't prepared to occupy a position. I've seen such pitiful cases in the South — barely tolerated spinsters living upon the grudging patronage of sister's husband or brother's wife! — stuck away in some little mouse-trap of a room — encouraged by one in-law to visit another — little birdlike women without any nest — eating the crust of humility all their life! Is that the future that we've mapped out for ourselves?

Tennessee Williams
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
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
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.

Tennessee Williams
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
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..

Tennessee Williams
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
In human character, simplicity doesn't exist except among simpletons.

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

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

Tennessee Williams
To begin with, I turn back time. I reverse it to that quaint period, the thirties, when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had failed them, or they had failed their eyes, and so they were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy.

Tennessee Williams