Quotes from Tennessee Williams

Glass breaks so easily. No matter how careful you are.

The biggest of all differences in this world is between the ones that had or have pleasure in love and those that haven't and hadn't any pleasure in love, but just watched with sick envy.

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.

When something is festering in your memory or your imagination, laws of silence don't work, it's just like shutting a door and locking it on a house on fire in hope of forgetting the house is burning. But not facing a fire doesn't put it out. Silence about a thing just magnifies it. It grows and festers in silence, becomes malignant...

A fire smokes the most when you start pouring water on it.

Life is important. There is nothing to hold onto. A man that drinks is throwing his life away. Don't do it, hold on to your life. There is nothing else to hold on to...

He was always running or bounding, never just walking. He seemed always at the point of defeating the law of gravity.

Of course, you were crowned with laurel in the beginning, your gold hair was wreathed with laurel, but the gold is thinning and the laurel has withered. Face it – pitiful monster.

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

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.

I don't believe in villains or heroes--only right or wrong ways that individuals have taken, not by choice but by necessity or by certain still-uncomprehended influences in themselves, their circumstances, and their antecedents.

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

I have a poet's weakness for symbols.

You can be young without money but you can't be old without it. You've got to be old with money because to be old without it is just too awful, you've got to be one or the other, either young or with money , you can't be old and without it. - That's the truth , Brick...

The role of benefactor is worse than thankless, it's the role of a victim, Doctor, a sacrificial victim, yes, they want your blood, Doctor, they want your blood on the altar steps of their outraged, outrageous egos!

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

I'm a poet. And then I put the poetry in the drama. I put it in short stories, and I put it in the plays. Poetry's poetry. It doesn't have to be called a poem, you know.

Keep awake, alive, new. Perform the paradox of being hard and yet soft. Survive without calcification of the tender membranes. Be a poet. Be alive.

A beautiful trust. A rare and beautiful trust. It makes me cry a little. That's all that life has to give in the way of perfection. The warm and complete understanding of two in a close-walled room with the windows blind to the world.

I soon found myself becoming indifferent to people. A well cynicism rose in me. Conversations all sounded as if they had been recorded years ago and were being played back on a turntable.

A man like that is someone to go out with—once—twice—three times when the devil is in you. But live with? Have a child by?

You two had something that had to be kept on ice, yes, incorruptible, yes!--and death was the only icebox where you could keep it....

Luck is believing your lucky.

I have met a great many people, nearly all friendly, many of whom I was fairly intimate with in one way of another, but nobody has seemed as close to me in spirit as you are. That was why I thought only of you at those times when my life seemed in danger of falling to pieces.