Tennessee Williams Quotes

162 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Tennessee Williams
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. It always came upon me unawares, taking me altogether by surprise. Perhaps it was a familiar bit of music. Perhaps it was only a piece of transparent glass.

Tennessee Williams
Why you're not crippled, you just have a little defect — hardly noticeable, even! When people have some slight disadvantage like that, they cultivate other things to make up for it — develop charm — and vivacity — and — charm!

Tennessee Williams
Brick: Well, they say nature hates a vacuum, Big Daddy.
Big Daddy: That's what they say, but sometimes I think that a vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with.

Tennessee Williams
And so tonight we're going to make the lie true, and when that's done, I'll bring the liquor back here and we'll get drunk together, here, tonight, in this place that death has come into...

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

Tennessee Williams
Why, man alive, Laura! Just look about you a little. What do you see? A world full of common people! All of 'em born and all of em' going to die! Which of them has one-tenth of your good points! Or mine! Or anyone else's, as far as that goes - gosh! Everybody excels in some one thing. Some in many!

Tennessee Williams
Well, now I've said it, my son was looking for God. I mean for a clear image of Him. He spent that whole blazing equatorial day in the crow's nest of the schooner watching that thing on the beach of the Encantadas till it was too dark to see it, and when he came back down the rigging, he said, Well, now I've seen Him!—and he meant God...

Tennessee Williams
We're all of us guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.

Tennessee Williams
I wish you were my sister. I'd teach you to have some confidence in yourself. The different people are not like other people, but being different is nothing to be ashamed of. Because other people are not such wonderful people. They're one hundred times one thousand. You're one times one! They walk all over the earth. You just stay here. They're common as — weeds, but — you — well, you're — Blue Roses!

Tennessee Williams
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?

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

Tennessee Williams
I don't mean what other people mean when they speak of a home, because I don't regard a home as a...well, as a place, a building...a house...of wood, bricks, stone. I think of a home as being a thing that two people have between them in which each can...well, nest.

Tennessee Williams
Only animals have to satisfy instincts! Surely your aims are somewhat higher than theirs! Than monkeys! Pigs!

Tennessee Williams
It is planned speeches that contain lies or dissimulations, not what you blurt out so spontaneously in one instant.

Tennessee Williams
There's no better credit card in the world than driving up at a bank door in a Cadillac limousine.

Tennessee Williams
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. Let's leave it like that.

Tennessee Williams
When I write I don't aim to shock people, and I'm surprised when I do. 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 set out to tell the truth. And sometimes the truth is shocking.

Tennessee Williams
Youth must be wanton, youth must be quick, Dance to the candle while lasteth the wick.

Tennessee Williams
You take it for granted that I am in something that I want to get out of.

Tennessee Williams
Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art: that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance.

Tennessee Williams
I don't think a married couple can go through life without laughs together any more than they can without tears.

Tennessee Williams
Marriage is an economic arrangement in many ways, let's face it.

Tennessee Williams
I have always been more interested in creating a character that contains something crippled. I think nearly all of us have some kind of defect.

Tennessee Williams
They chatter together like birds on Cypress Hill, but all they say is 'Live, live, live, live, live!' It's all they've learned, it's the only advice they can give.

Tennessee Williams
We are all of us born, live and die in the shadow of a giant question mark that refers to three questions: Where do we come from? Why? And where, oh where, are we going!

Tennessee Williams
A drinking man's someone who wants to forget he isn't still young an' believing.

Tennessee Williams