Tennessee Williams Quotes

“Show me a person who hasn´t known any sorrow and I´ll show you a superficial.”
― Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire

“I am sitting at my kitchen table waiting for my lover to arrive with lettuce and tomatoes and rum and sherry wine and a big floury loaf of bread in the fading sunlight. Coffee is percolating gently, and my mood is mellow. I have been very happy lately, just wallowing in it selfishly, knowing it will not last very long, which is all the more reason to enjoy it now. I suppose life always ends badly for almost everybody. We must have long fingers and catch at whatever we can while it is passing near us.”
― Tennessee Williams, Notebooks

“When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I'm only really alive when I'm writing.”
― Tennessee Williams

“...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...”
― Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire and Other Plays

“Most people's lives—what are they but trails of debris, each day more debris, more debris, long, long trails of debris with nothing to clean it all up but, finally, death.”
― Tennessee Williams, Suddenly Last Summer

“If I could just give myself to the steady peace of the rain. That lovely steady peace.”
― Tennessee Williams

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

“I like to see the people arriving. I like to imagine their lives. It keeps me from thinking too much about my own. A man shouldn't be too introspective. It weakens him. That is the difference between Tennessee Williams and Ernest Hemingway. I'm a Hemingway man myself although I don't believe it is right to hunt lions.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The World and Other Places: Stories

“I can't guarantee that a lobotomy would stop her—babbling!!”
― Tennessee Williams, Suddenly Last Summer

“BRICK [to the moon]: I envy you--you cool son of a bitch.”
― Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

“Sevdiğin biriyle birlikte yaşamak daha da büyük yalnızlık… tamamen yalnız kalmaktan daha büyük yalnızlık! Eğer sevdiğin kişi seni sevmiyorsa…”
― Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

“And in the spring, it's touching to notice them making their first discovery of love! As if nobody had ever known it before!”
― Tennessee Williams

“All of us are seeking a home, and I don't mean where we were born, or where we now live and have things, but where we can do the big things, the right things. Where we belong, where we fit, where we're loved."--Tennessee Williams, "Follies of God: Tennessee Williams and the Women of the Fog”
― James Grissom

“Suskunluğun yasaları işlemiyor. Belleğinde ya da imgeleminde üreyip duran bir şeyler varsa suskunluğun yasaları işlemiyor, tıpkı bir kapıyı kapamak, yanmakta olan bir evin yandığını unutmak için anahtarı kilitte döndürmek gibi bir şey bu. Ama yangınla yüzleşmemek yangını söndürmüyor ki. Bir konuda susmak o konunun boyutlarını büyütüyor sadece. Suskunlukta büyüyor, ürüyor o şey, kötücül oluyor…”
― Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

“My places were emotional, primarily. I wrote of locales in which I had lived, or in which I imagined I could live, but the topography was primal and sexual and terminal. It bore no distinct architecture or design or dialect. It was merely human and in peril, which is to say universal. But on Royal and Coliseum and Vista--streets I cannot relinquish--I found my places and I dreamed a narrative. Can I go there and find it again?"--Tennessee Williams”
― James Grissom, Follies of God: Tennessee Williams and the Women of the Fog

“Yes, we all use each other and that's what we think of as love, and not being able to use each other is what's--hate....”
― Tennessee Williams, Suddenly Last Summer

“Memory, of course, is unreliable, often evil, but it is the source of our identity."--Tennessee Williams”
― James Grissom

“[Tennessee] William's writing has the effect that all great writing has on an actor. It steadies you. It emboldens you You ride an elevator to the top floor of a building, you jump off the penthouse balcony, and you fly. Just put one foot in front of the other, one line after the other, one moment after the other, and you are walking on air. It was the creative experience of a lifetime. (playing Stanley in Streetcar Named Desire)”
― Alec Baldwin, Nevertheless

“Carlos leek altijd over zijn toeren, alsof hij net een stuk of vijf benzedrinetabletten had geslikt. Je kon zijn aandacht niet langer dan één minuut op hetzelfde gericht houden. Van een mening over een stuk van Tennessee Williams sprong hij over op de decorontwerpen van een of andere Fransman, een opname van Sarah Bernhardt die hij op de Universidad had gehoord, een stuk dat een student had geschreven en waarvoor hij overwoog de regering om subsidie te vragen, zodat het kon worden gespeeld. Meeslepend, dat wel, maar niet erg bevredigend. En kon uit al die opwinding kunst voortkomen? Was kunst niet – bijna altijd – emotie die in alle rust tot bespiegeling wordt verheven? Ook voor een zuiderling? Theodore moest lachen om zijn eigen vurige ernst.”
― Patricia Highsmith, A Game for the Living