110+ Tennessee Williams Quotes On Death, Writing And Friendship

Tennessee Williams was an American playwright who wrote many classic plays such as A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and The Glass Menagerie. He was a major figure in American literature and is considered one of the most influential playwrights of the 20th century. His works often explored the themes of desire, death, and the human condition. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Tennessee Williams on death, love, writing.

Top 10 Tennessee Williams Quotes

1. All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.
2. There is a time for departure even when there's no certain place to go.
3. It's interesting, isn't it? . . . the chandelier . . . it reminds me of mushroom soup.
4. What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it's curved like a road through mountains.
5. Success is blocked by concentrating on it and planning for it... Success is shy - it won't come out while you're watching.
6. I can't stand a naked light bulb, any more than I can a rude remark or a vulgar action.
7. Caged birds accept each other, but flight is what they long for.
8. Don't look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you'll know you're dead.
9. A prayer for the wild at heart kept in cages.
10. The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that's also a hypocrite!

Tennessee Williams Image Quotes

Caged birds accept each other, but flight is what they long for. — Tennessee Williams

A prayer for the wild at heart kept in cages. — Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams Short Quotes

• I'm not living with you. We occupy the same cage. (Maggie)
• Friends are God's way of apologizing to us for our families
• I don't want realism. I want magic!
• Revolution only needs good dreamers who remember their dreams.
• Kill off all my demons and my angels might die too.
• The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.
• Luck is believing you're lucky.
• All pretty girls are a trap, a pretty trap, and men expect them to be.
• Something in me will save me from utter ruin no matter what comes.
• Men don't want anything they get too easy. But on the other hand, men lose interest quickly.

Tennessee Williams Quotes About Death

Mendacity is a system that we live in," declares Brick. "Liquor is one way out an'death's the other. — Tennessee Williams

I try to work every day because you have no refuge but writing. When you're going through a period of unhappiness, a broken love affair, the death of someone you love, or some other disorder in your life, then you have no refuge but writing. — Tennessee Williams

Death is one moment, and life is so many of them. — Tennessee Williams

Security is a kind of death. — Tennessee Williams

The human animal is a beast that dies but the fact that he’s dying don’t give him pity for others. — Tennessee Williams

Time goes by so fast. Nothin' can outrun it. Death commences too early--almost before you're half-acquainted with life--you meet the other. — Tennessee Williams

Liquor is one way out an’ death’s the other. — Tennessee Williams

And funerals are pretty compared to deaths. — Tennessee Williams

And so tonight we're going to make the lie true, and when that's done, I'll bring the liquor back here and we'll get drunk together, here, tonight, in this place that death has come into... — Tennessee Williams

A man, when he burns, leaves only a handful of ashes. No woman can hold him. The wind must blow him away. — Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams Quotes About Love

Don't you just love these long rainy afternoons in New Orleans when an hour isn't just an hour — but a little bit of eternity dropped in your hands — and who knows what to do with it? — Tennessee Williams

Devils can be driven out of the heart by the touch of a hand on a hand, or a mouth on a mouth. — Tennessee Williams

When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone. — Tennessee Williams

These are the intensities that one cannot live with, that he has to outgrow if he wants to survive. But who can help grieving for them? If the blood vessels could hold them, how much better to keep those early loves with us? — Tennessee Williams

We have to distrust each other. It is our only defense against betrayal. — Tennessee Williams

Oh, you weak, beautiful people who give up with such grace. What you need is someone to take hold of you--gently, with love, and hand your life back to you, like something gold you let go of--and I can! I'm determined to do it--and nothing's more determined than a cat on a tin roof--is there? — Tennessee Williams

Oh, you weak, beautiful people who give up with such grace. What you need is someone to take hold of you - gently, with love, and hand your life back to you. — Tennessee Williams

All my life I have been haunted by the obsession that to desire a thing or to love a thing intensely is to place yourself in a vulnerable position, to be a possible, if not a probable, loser of what you most want. Let's leave it like that. — Tennessee Williams

Just another four-letter word. — Tennessee Williams

Living with someone you love can be lonelier than living entirely alone, if the on that you love doesn't love you. — Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams Quotes About Writing

It's hard enough for me to write what I want to write without me trying to write what you say they want me to write which I don't want to write. — Tennessee Williams

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

There is no pleasure in the world like writing well and going fast. — Tennessee Williams

My greatest affliction... is perhaps the major theme of my writings, the affliction of loneliness that follows me like a shadow, a very ponderous shadow too heavy to drag after me all of my days and nights. — Tennessee Williams

I'm only really alive when I'm writing. — Tennessee Williams

For a creative person there's just as much pleasure in writing an eight-line poem as there is in writing a blockbuster play ... of the old '50s type. — Tennessee Williams

If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it. — Tennessee Williams

I talk out the lines as I write them. — Tennessee Williams

There is no pleasure in the world like writing well and going fast. It's like nothing else. It's like a love affair, it goes on and on, and doesn't end in marriage. It's all courtship. — Tennessee Williams

I believe the way to write a good play is to convince yourself it is easy to do, then go ahead and do it with ease. — Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams Quotes About Life

We're all of us guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress. — Tennessee Williams

You can be young without money but you can't be old without it. — Tennessee Williams

I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person. But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people really. — Tennessee Williams

A high station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace. — Tennessee Williams

Make voyages. Attempt them. There's nothing else. — Tennessee Williams

To be free is to have achieved your life. — Tennessee Williams

Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going. — Tennessee Williams

We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life. — Tennessee Williams

Enthusiasm is the most important thing in life. — Tennessee Williams

I gave up visiting my psychoanalyst because he was meddling too much in my private life. — Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams Quotes About Time

There comes a time when you look into the mirror and you realize that what you see is all that you will ever be. And then you accept it. Or you kill yourself. Or you stop looking in mirrors. — Tennessee Williams

The future is called 'perhaps,' which is the only possible thing to call the future. And the important thing is not to allow that to scare you. — Tennessee Williams

The theatre is a place where one has time for the problems of people to whom one would show the door if they came to one's office for a job. — Tennessee Williams

Time rushes towards us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation. — Tennessee Williams

It is, perhaps more than anything else, the arrest of time which has taken place in a completed work of art that gives certain plays their feeling of depth and significance. — Tennessee Williams

The strongest influences in my life and my work are always whomever I love. Whomever I love and am with most of the time, or whomever I remember most vividly. I think that's true of everyone, don't you? — Tennessee Williams

I don't ask for your pity, but just your understanding - no, not even that -no. Just for your recognition of me in you, and the enemy, time, in us all. — Tennessee Williams

How long does it have to go on? This punishment? Haven't I done time enough, haven't I served my term? can't I apply for a-pardon? — Tennessee Williams

I think time is a merciless thing. I think life is a process of burning oneself out and time is the fire that burns you. — Tennessee Williams

Time is the longest distance between two places. — Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams Quotes About People

I don't mean what other people mean when they speak of a home, because I don't regard a home as a...well, as a place, a building...a house...of wood, bricks, stone. I think of a home as being a thing that two people have between them in which each can...well, nest. — Tennessee Williams

Don't you think there is always something unspoken between two people? — Tennessee Williams

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. — Tennessee Williams

We are all civilized people, wich means that we are all savages at heart but observing a few amenities of civilized behaviour. — Tennessee Williams

Oh you weak, beautiful people who give up with such grace. What you need is someone to take hold of you — Tennessee Williams

If I am no longer disturbed myself, I will deal less with disturbed people, but I don't regret having concerned myself with them because I think most of us are disturbed. — Tennessee Williams

People go to the movies instead of moving. Hollywood characters are supposed to have all the adventures for everybody in America, while everybody in America sits in a dark room and watches them have them. — Tennessee Williams

You said, 'They’re harmless dreamers and they’re loved by the people.' 'What,' I asked you, 'is harmless about a dreamer, and what,' I asked you, 'is harmless about the love of the people? Revolution only needs good dreamers who remember their dreams. — Tennessee Williams

If I am no longer disturbed myself, I will deal less with disturbed people and with violent material. I don't regret having concerned myself with such people, because I think that most of us are disturbed. — Tennessee Williams

Only some radical change can divert the downward course of my spirit, some startling new place or people to arrest the drift, the drag. — Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams Quotes About Person

Hell is yourself and the only redemption is when a person puts himself aside to feel deeply for another person. — Tennessee Williams

I respect a person that has had to fight and howl for his decency. — Tennessee Williams

Personal lyricism is the outcry of prisoner to prisoner from the cell in solitary where each is confined for the duration of his life. — Tennessee Williams

Show me a person who hasn´t known any sorrow and I´ll show you a superficial. — Tennessee Williams

The name of a person you love is more than language. — Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams Quotes About Feel

Most of the confidence which I appear to feel, especially when influenced by noon wine, is only a pretense. — Tennessee Williams

I think that hate is a feeling that can only exist where there is no understanding. — Tennessee Williams

Kenneth Hari does not paint portraits as they are but as he is. I feel he is hiding something from me. To board a train into his mind would give me a ride into dark adventure. — Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams Famous Quotes And Sayings

Caged birds accept each other, but flight is what they long for. — Tennessee Williams

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. — Tennessee Williams

A prayer for the wild at heart kept in cages. — Tennessee Williams

Vanity, fear, desire, competition - all such distortions within our own egos - condition our vision of those in relation to us. Add to those distortions to our own egos the corresponding distortions in the egos of others, and you see how cloudy the glass must become through which we look at each other. — Tennessee Williams

The scene is memory and is therefore nonrealistic. Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart. — Tennessee Williams

Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But 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. — Tennessee Williams

America has only three cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland. — Tennessee Williams

The rest of my days I'm going to spend on the sea. And when I die, I'm going to die on the sea. You know what I shall die of? I shall die of eating an unwashed grape. One day out on the ocean I will die — with my hand in the hand of some nice-looking ship's doctor, a very young one with a small blond moustache and a big silver watch. — Tennessee Williams

They told me to take a streetcar named Desire and then transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at - Elysian Fields! — Tennessee Williams

It is only in his work that an artist can find reality and satisfaction, for the actual world is less intense than the world of his invention and consequently his life, without recourse to violent disorder, does not seem very substantial. The right condition for him is that in which his work in not only convenient but unavoidable. — Tennessee Williams

An artist must believe in himself - Possibly not so passionately as Lawrence - but passionately. Your belief is contagious. Others say - He is vain - but they are affected. — Tennessee Williams

The nervous system of any age or nation is its creative workers, its artists. And if that nervous system is profoundly disturbed by its environment, the work it produces will inescapably reflect the disturbances, sometimes obliquely and sometimes with violent directness. — Tennessee Williams

Nothing's more determined than a cat on a hot tin roof. — Tennessee Williams

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

Physical beauty is passing - a transitory possession - but beauty of the mind, richness of the spirit, tenderness of the heart - I have all these things - aren't taken away but grow! Increase with the years! — Tennessee Williams

When I was fourteen, my father decided to initiate me into the ways of manhood, and took me to the local whorehouse. The woman spread her legs, and made me look between them. All I could see was something that looked like a dyin' orchid; consequently, I have never been comfortable around women or orchids. — Tennessee Williams

Youth must be wanton, youth must be quick, Dance to the candle while lasteth the wick. — Tennessee Williams

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

The most dangerous word in any human tongue is the word for brother. It's inflammatory. — Tennessee Williams

All good art is an indiscretion. — Tennessee Williams

The object of art is to make eternal the desperately fleeting moment. — Tennessee Williams

Once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle, you are equipped with the basic means of salvation. — Tennessee Williams

Snatching the eternal out of the desperately fleeting is the great magic trick of human existence. — Tennessee Williams

We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it. — Tennessee Williams

Of course you always had that detached quality as if you were playing a game without much concern over whether you won or lost, and now that you've lost the game, not lost but just quit playing, you have that rare sort of charm that usually only happens in very old or hopelessly sick people, the charm of the defeated. — Tennessee Williams

Like a cat on a hot tin roof. — Tennessee Williams

Some mystery should be left in the revelation of character in a play, just as a great deal of mystery is always left in the revelation of character in life, even in one's own character to himself. — Tennessee Williams

And then the searchlight which had been turned on the world was turned off again and never for one moment since has there been any light that's stronger than this-kitchen-candle. — Tennessee Williams

For nowadays the world is lit by lightning! Blow out your candles, Laura -- and so goodbye. . . . — Tennessee Williams

Everyone says he's sincere, but everyone isn't sincere. If everyone was sincere who says he's sincere there wouldn't be half so many insincere ones in the world and there would be lots, lots, lots more really sincere ones! — Tennessee Williams

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

There is only one true aristocracy . . . and that is the aristocracy of passionate souls! — Tennessee Williams

Symbols are nothing but the natural speech of drama. — Tennessee Williams

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. — Tennessee Williams

The only unforgivable sin is deliberate cruelty. — Tennessee Williams

And it was about then, about that time, that I began to find life unsatisfactory as an explanation of itself and was forced to adopt the method of the artist of not explaining but putting the blocks together in some other way that seems more significant to him. Which is a rather fancy way of saying I started writing. — Tennessee Williams

I have always been pushed by the negative. The apparent failure of a play sends me back to my typewriter that very night, before the reviews are out. I am more compelled to get back to work than if I had a success. — Tennessee Williams

I've got the guts to die. What I want to know is, have you got the guts to live? — Tennessee Williams

Animals have sections in their stomachs which enable them to digest food without mastication, but human beings are supposed to chew their food before they swallow it down... So chew your food and give your salivary glands a chance to function! — Tennessee Williams

I don't think there is such a thing as a precise sexual orientation. I think we're all ambiguous sexually. — Tennessee Williams

Go, then! Go to the moon-you selfish dreamer! — Tennessee Williams

Girls that aren't cut out for business careers usually wind up married to some nice man. — Tennessee Williams

I don't believe anyone ever suspects how completely unsure I am of my work and myself and what tortures of self-doubting the doubt of others has always given me. — Tennessee Williams

What is the victory of a cat on a hot tin roof? - I wish I knew... Just staying on it, I guess, as long as she can. — Tennessee Williams

A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with. — Tennessee Williams

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

He was a boy, just a boy, when I was a very young girl. When I was sixteen, I made the discovery - love. All at once and much, much too completely. It was like you suddenly turned a blinding on something that had always been half in shadow, that's how it struck the world for me. But I was unlucky. Deluded. — Tennessee Williams

But there are things that happen between a man and a woman in the dark -- that sort of make everything else seem -- unimportant. — Tennessee Williams

The helpless can't help the helpless. — Tennessee Williams

Luxury is the wolf at the door and its fangs are the vanities and conceits germinated by success. When an artist learns this, he knows where the danger is. — Tennessee Williams

I know I fib a good deal. After all, a woman's charm is fifty per cent illusion, but when a thing is important I tell the truth. - Blanche Scene II — Tennessee Williams

Life Lessons by Tennessee Williams

1. Tennessee Williams taught us to embrace our individuality and to never be ashamed of our unique perspectives and experiences.
2. He also showed us the importance of being open and honest about our emotions and to never be afraid to express ourselves.
3. Finally, he demonstrated the power of storytelling to bring people together and to create meaningful connections.