105 Hand-picked Tennessee Williams Quotes
Thomas Lanier Williams III (1911-1983) was born in Columbus, Mississippi, of English, Welsh, and Huguenot ancestry. He adopted “Tennessee Williams” as his professional name around 1939 and kicked off his career with the 1940s hit, “The Glass Menagerie.” From there the celebrated writer solidified his role as a 20th century stagemaster, creating award-winning plays like “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “Sweet Bird of Youth”. Tennessee Williams is known to have incorporated many elements of his life experiences in his numerous works and in 1948 and 1955 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for two of his plays.
Nonetheless, during the last decades of his life, he was plagued with bouts of personal struggles, alcoholism and prescription drug abuse. In 1975 he published his Memoirs, which detailed his life and discussed his addiction to drugs and alcohol, as well as his homosexuality. Eight years later Tennessee Williams died in a New York City hotel filled with half-finished bottles of wine and pills. It was in this desperation, which Williams had so closely known and so honestly written about, that we can find a great man, a tragic, talented writer and an important body of work. His genius was in the perseverance to tell his stories and in his honesty. Williams is still honored as a monumental literary figure, champion of the underdog and iconic gay personality. “I’ve had a wonderful and terrible life and I wouldn’t cry for myself,” he wrote in his memoirs.
Table of Contents
- Short Tennessee Williams Quotes
- Funny Tennessee Williams Quotes
- Inspirational Tennessee Williams Quotes
- Cynical Tennessee Williams Quotes
- Insightful Tennessee Williams Quotes
- Poetic Tennessee Williams Quotes
- Timeless Tennessee Williams Love Quotes
- Tennessee Williams Quotes On Images
Short Tennessee Williams Quotes
- If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels. Tennessee Williams
- A prayer for the wild at heart kept in cages. Tennessee Williams
- Time is the longest distance between two places. Tennessee Williams
- In memory, everything seems to happen to music. Tennessee Williams
- Everybody is nothing until you love them. Tennessee Williams
- If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it. Tennessee Williams
- Friends are God’s way of apologizing to us for our families. Tennessee Williams
- Success and failure are equally disastrous. Tennessee Williams
- Never inside, I didn’t lie in my heart. Tennessee Williams
- Why is it so damn hard for people to talk? Tennessee Williams
- Symbols are nothing but the natural speech of drama. Tennessee Williams
- All good art is an indiscretion. Tennessee Williams
- Go, then! Go to the moon, you selfish dreamer! Tennessee Williams
- I’ll be all right in a minute, I’m just bewildered by life. Tennessee Williams
- Enthusiasm is the most important thing in life. Tennessee Williams
- Luck is believing you’re lucky. Tennessee Williams
Funny Tennessee Williams Quotes
- People go to the movies instead of moving. Tennessee Williams
- You can be young without money, but you can’t be old without it. 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
- It’s interesting, isn’t it? The chandelier… it reminds me of mushroom soup. Tennessee Williams
- America has only three cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland. Tennessee Williams
- Funerals are pretty compared to deaths. 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
Inspirational Tennessee Williams Quotes
- Death is one moment, and life is so many of them. Tennessee Williams
- I have always depended on the kindness of strangers. Tennessee Williams
- I’ve got the guts to die. What I want to know is, have you got the guts to live? Tennessee Williams
- Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory. Tennessee Williams
- Make voyages. Attempt them. There’s nothing else. Tennessee Williams
- To be free is to have achieved your life. 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
- There’s a time for departure even when there’s no certain place to go. Tennessee Williams
- Dead people give such good advice. Just one word- live! Tennessee Williams
- Possess your soul in patience – you will see! Tennessee Williams
- 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. Tennessee Williams
- Attempting to find in motion what was lost in space. Tennessee Williams
- There is only one true aristocracy and that is the aristocracy of passionate souls! Tennessee Williams
- Hell is yourself and the only redemption is when a person puts himself aside to feel deeply for another person. Tennessee Williams
- Once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle, you are equipped with the basic means of salvation. Tennessee Williams
- Being disappointed is one thing and being discouraged is something else. I am disappointed but I am not discouraged. Tennessee Williams
- Life is an unanswered question, but let’s still believe in the dignity and importance of the question. Tennessee Williams
- 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. Tennessee Williams
- A high station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace. Tennessee Williams
- It’s like a switch, clickin’ off in my head. Turns the hot light off and the cool one on, and all of a sudden there’s peace. Tennessee Williams
- When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I’m only really alive when I’m writing. Tennessee Williams
- 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. Tennessee Williams
Cynical Tennessee Williams Quotes
- Mendacity is a system that we live in. Liquor is one way out an death’s the other. Tennessee Williams
- 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
- All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness. Tennessee Williams
- Don’t look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you’ll know you’re dead. Tennessee Williams
- I’m not living with you. We occupy the same cage. Tennessee Williams
- All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent. Tennessee Williams
- People are not so dreadful when you know them. Tennessee Williams
- A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with. Tennessee Williams
- We have to distrust each other. It’s our only defense against betrayal. Tennessee Williams
- The human animal is a beast that dies but the fact that he’s dying don’t give him pity for others. Tennessee Williams
- Living with someone you love can be lonelier than living entirely alone, if the one that you love doesn’t love you. Tennessee Williams
- All of us are guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress. Tennessee Williams
- The Venus flytrap, a devouring organism, aptly named for the goddess of love. Tennessee Williams
Insightful Tennessee Williams Quotes
- Life is partly what we make it, and partly what it is made by the friends we choose. Tennessee Williams
- I think that hate is a feeling that can only exist where there is no understanding. 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
- Time doesn’t take away from friendship, nor does separation. 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
- Some things are not forgivable. Deliberate cruelty is not forgivable. It is the most unforgivable thing in my opinion, and the one thing in which I have never, ever been guilty. Tennessee Williams
- I want what I’m afraid of and I’m afraid of what I want so that I’m like a storm inside that can’t break loose! Tennessee Williams
- 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! Tennessee Williams
- We’re all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life. 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
- Most of the confidence which I appear to feel, especially when influenced by noon wine, is only a pretense. Tennessee Williams
- Show me a person who hasn’t known any sorrow and I´ll show you a superficial. Tennessee Williams
- 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. Tennessee Williams
- Nobody, nobody, was tender and trusting as she was. But people like you abused her, and forced her to change. Tennessee Williams
- Somebody said once or wrote, once: ‘We’re all of us children in a vast kindergarten trying to spell God’s name with the wrong alphabet blocks! Tennessee Williams
- I cannot write any sort of story unless there is at least one character in it for whom I have physical desire. Tennessee Williams
- 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.
- A drinking man is someone who wants to forget he isn’t still young and believing. Tennessee Williams
- Time goes by so fast. Nothing can outrun it. Death commences too early ― almost before you’re half-acquainted with life ― you meet the other. Tennessee Williams
- 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
- The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that’s also a hypocrite! 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. Tennessee Williams
- All pretty girls are a trap, a pretty trap, and men expect them to be. 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
- We are all civilized people, which means that we are all savages at heart but observing a few amenities of civilized behaviour. Tennessee Williams
- 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
- The trouble with this world is that everybody has to compromise and conform. Tennessee Williams
- 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
Poetic Tennessee Williams Quotes
- How beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken. Tennessee Williams
- When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.
- I don’t want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don’t tell the truth, I tell what ought to be the truth. And it that’s sinful, then let me be damned for 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
- The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks. 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
- 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
- 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
- I can’t stand a naked light bulb, any more than I can a rude remark or a vulgar action. 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. Tennessee Williams
- Openings come quickly, sometimes, like blue space in running clouds. A complete overcast, then a blaze of light. Tennessee Williams
- I saw that it was all over, put away in a box like a doll no longer cared for, the magical intimacy of our childhood together. Tennessee Williams
Timeless Tennessee Williams Love Quotes
- The name of a person you love is more than language. Tennessee Williams
- We’ve had this date with each other from the beginning. Tennessee Williams
- Oh, you can’t describe someone you’re in love with! Tennessee Williams
- 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. Tennessee Williams
- Caged birds accept each other, but flight is what they long for. Tennessee Williams
- There are things that happen between a man and a woman in the dark that sort of make everything else seem unimportant. Tennessee Williams
- 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
- Is a lifetime long enough to hold the regret that I have for that fantastically aborted but crazily sweet love affair? Tennessee Williams
Tennessee Williams Quotes On Images
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