Quotes from Tennessee Williams

I followed, from then on, in my father's footsteps, attempting to find in motion what was lost in space.

For there was a conspiracy of dullness in the world, a universal plan to shut out the resurgences of spirit which might interfere with clockwork.

To be free is to have achieved your life.

I go to the movies because – I like adventure. Adventure is something I don't have much of at work, so I go to the movies.

In human character, simplicity doesn't exist except among simpletons.

When something is Festering on your memory or in 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. Silence about a thing just magnifies it. It grows and festers in silence, becomes malignant...

If I could just give myself to the steady peace of the rain. That lovely steady peace.

A fragile, unearthly prettiness has come out in Laura: she is like a piece of translucent glass touched by light, given a momentary radiance, not actual, not lasting.

As for me, no one will ever love me. But you could get used to me, couldn't you, Jimmy?

He was a telephone man who fell in love with long distance.

We mustn't scream at each other, the walls in this house have ears...

I met her last summer on a moonlight boat trip...

Monsters don't die early; they hang on long. Awfully long. Their vanity's infinite, almost as infinite as their disgust with themselves.

I am running away but I prefer to call it a strategic retreat.

At the age of fourteen I discovered writing as an escape from a world of reality in which I felt acutely uncomfortable.

Let's go down and swim in that liquid moonlight.

Big Daddy: Ignorance - of mortality - is a comfort.

Distant singing is heard. Ghostly voices become audible: fragments of lectures remembered, the finely distilled wisdom and passion of seers and poets with which the modern young mind is tempered for the world that blows it to pieces.

When things don't change, their sameness becomes an accretion. That is why all society puts on flesh. Succumbs to the cubicles and begins to fill them.

What's talent but the ability to get away with something?

he would die early, since nothing so fair could decline by common degrees in a faded season.

I'm starting to boil inside. I know I seem dreamy, but inside-well, I'm boiling! Whenever I pick up a shoe, I shudder a little thinking how short life is and what I am doing!

This play is dedicated to the memory of Clarence Darrow , The Great Defender, whose mental frontiers were the four corners of the sky.

You know it don't take much intelligence to get yourself into a nailed-up coffin, Laura. But who in hell ever got himself out of one without removing one nail?