Quotes from Tennessee Williams

The future becomes the present, the present the past, and the past turns into ever lasting regret if you don't plan for it!

Princess, the great difference between people in this world is not between the rich and the poor or the good and the evil, the biggest of all differences in this world is between the ones that had or have the pleasure in love and those that haven't and hadn't any pleasure in love, but just watched it with envy, sick envy. The spectators and the performers.

Nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own egos. That is the way we all see each other in life. [As quoted in Elia Kazan's autobiography, A Life (1988)]

Symbols are nothing but the natural speech of drama.

Is a lifetime long enough to hold the regret that I have for that fantastically aborted but crazily sweet love affair?

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.

I'll tell you what I want. Magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misinterpret things to them. I don't tell the truth. I tell what ought to be truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it! - Don't turn the light on!

It is almost as if you were frantically constructing another world while the world that you live in dissolves beneath your feet, and that your survival depends on completing this construction at least one second before the old habitation collapses.

love, all at once and much, much too completely. It's like you suddenly turn a blinding light on something that had always been half a shadow...

I want to rest. I want to breathe quietly again.

Young, gifted, and destitute...

We have not long to love. Light does not stay. The tender things are those we fold away. Coarse fabrics are the ones for common wear. In silence I have watched you comb your hair. Intimate the silence, dim and warm. I could but did not, reach to touch your arm. I could, but do not, break that which is still. (Almost the faintest whisper would be shrill.) So moments pass as though they wished to stay. We have not long to love. A night. A day....

I know all about the tyranny of women.

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

The human animal is a beast that dies and if he's got money he buys and buys and buys and I think the reason he buys everything he can buy is that in the back of his mind he has the crazy hope that one of his purchases will be life everlasting!--Which it never can be....

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.

Blanche: No, I have the misfortune of being an English instructor. I attempt to instill a bunch of bobby-soxers and drugstore Romeos with a reverence for Hawthorne and Whitman and Poe!

Sometimes—there's God—so quickly!

Openings come quickly, sometimes, like blue space in running clouds. A complete overcast, then a blaze of light....

What's that smell in this room? Didn't you notice it, Brick? Didn't you notice a powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity in this room? There ain't nothin' more powerful than the odor of mendacity. You can smell it. It smells like death. —Big Daddy

human beings dream of life everlasting, that's the reason! But most of them want it on earth and not in heaven.

Well, sooner or later, at some point in your life, the thing that you lived for is lost or abandoned, and then ... you die, or find something else.

Nothing human disgusts me unless its unkind

Jim lights a cigarette and leans indolently back on his elbow smiling at Laura with a warmth and charm which lights her inwardly with altar candles.