Quotes by Tennessee Williams

About Tennessee Williams:

Thomas Lanier is considered among the three foremost playwrights in 20th century American drama.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.

Tennessee Williams

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

Tennessee Williams

Make voyages. Attempt them. There's nothing else.

Tennessee Williams

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

Tennessee Williams

A drinking man's someone who wants to forget he isn't still young and believing

Tennessee Williams

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!--Whic...

Tennessee Williams

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 facin...

Tennessee Williams

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

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

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....

Tennessee Williams

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.

Tennessee Williams

a grin that wasn't natural, and that combined in a strange way affection and arrogance, the arrogance of the idealist who doesn't realize how easily he can be fooled.

Tennessee Williams

I can't do nothing. Just put it off. And that don't do no good. I reckon it belong to me. I reckon what I going to get ain't no more than mine.

Tennessee Williams

When I was fifteen, a companion and I, on a dare, went into the mound one day just at sunset. We saw some of those Indians for the first time; we got directions from them and reached the top of the mound just as the sun set. We had camping equiptment...

Tennessee Williams

So Father Ring went off in the lofty mood of a man who has defended a principle at a great sacrifice to himself, but that very night he began to brood and he continued to brood till that sickly looking voluptuary of a ten-shilling note took on all th...

Tennessee Williams

Maybe I'll have a tumour like his someday. At first it will be a small but growing sphere that will branch out, growing larger in my stomach like a fetus. I will probably feel it when it starts to take motion, moving inward with the fury of a sleepwa...

Tennessee Williams

Novels are forged in passion, demand fidelity and commitment, often drive you to boredom or rage, sleep with you at night. They are the long haul. They are marriage. Stories, on the other hand, you can lose yourself in for a few weeks and then wrap u...

Tennessee Williams

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.

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

I suppose we all have our little hiding-hole if the truth was known, but as small as it is, the whole world is in it, and bit by bit grows on us again till the day You find us out.

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 signific...

Tennessee Williams

Author Bio

  • NameTennessee Williams
  • DescriptionAmerican playwright
  • AliasesThomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams III; Thomas Lanier Williams III
  • BornMarch 26, 1911
  • DiedFebruary 25, 1983
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionPlaywright; Novelist; Screenwriter; Writer
  • AwardsPulitzer Prize For Drama