Quotes from 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!

You don't know things anywhere! You live in a dream, you manufacture illusions!

I'm not really so hard & cynical after all - in fact I'm still dangerously soft.

It was useless trying to explain to Cecila that poetry wasn't a commodity, that it could never be bought or sold, that it was, in fact, unteansferrable, remaining forever a part of the one who wrote it.

Everything diminishes with time, my darling, but my feelings for certain people pierce me daily, and it is no illusion that they center me and let me know who I am, and let me know that I have loved and have been loved, no matter how badly or clumsily.

Laws of silence don't work…. 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 that the house is burning. But not facing a fire doesn't put it out.

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.

We have to distrust each other. It is our only defence against betrayal.

Princess, the age of some people can only be calculated by the level of - level of - rot in them.

Come on, indulge yourself. You got nothing to lose that won't be lost.

Nothing human disgusts me . . . unless it's cruel, violent. (spoken by the character Hannah Jelkes)

I know! WHY! – Am I so catty? – Cause I'm consumed with envy an' eaten up with longing? –

Life that winter in Rome: a golden dream, and I don't mean Rafaello and the mimosa and the total freedom of life. Stop there: What I do mean is the total freedom of life and Rafaello and the mimosa and the letto matrimoniale and the Frascati when morning work was over.

There are no 'good' or 'bad' people. Some are a little better or a little worse but all are activated more by misunderstanding than malice. A blindness to what is going on in each other's hearts... Nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own egos. That is the way we all see each other in life.

Animal joy in his being is implicit in all his movements and attitudes. Since earliest manhood the center of his life has been pleasure with women, the giving and taking of it, not with weak indulgence, dependently, but with the power and pride of a richly feathered male bird among hens. […] He sizes women up with a glance, with sexual classifications, crude images flashing into his mind and determining the way he smiles at them.

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!

And funerals are pretty compared to deaths. Funerals are quiet, but deaths—not always. Sometimes their breathing is hoarse, sometimes it rattles, sometimes they cry out to you, Don't let me go! Even the old sometimes say, Don't let me go! As if you were able to stop them! Funerals are quiet with pretty flowers. And oh, what gorgeous boxes they pack them away in!

Youth must be wanton, youth must be quick, Dance to the candle while lasteth the wick, Youth must be foolish and mirthful and blind, Gaze not before and glance not behind, Mark not the shadow that darkens the way- Regret not the glitter of any lost day, But laugh with no reason except the red wine, For youth must be youthful and foolish and blind!

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

Life is such a mysteriously complicated thing that no one should really presume to judge and condemn the behavior of anyone else.

BRICK [to the moon]: I envy you--you cool son of a bitch.

That Europe is nothin' on earth but a great big auction, that's all it is, that bunch of old worn-out places, it's just a big fire-sale, the whole rutten thing.

I never met a woman that didn't know if she was good-looking or not without being told, and some of them give themselves credit for more than they've got.

human beings dream of life everlasting. But most of them want it on earth and not in heaven.