You’ve got many refinements. I don’t think you need to worry about your failure at long division. I mean, after all, you got through short division, and short division is all that a lady ought to be called on to cope with.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Women
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
Topics: Luxury, Success & Failure, Success
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
Topics: Revolutions, Revolutionaries, Revolution
When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Loneliness
Mendacity is a system that we live in. Liquor is one way out an death’s the other.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Lies, Deception/Lying, Lying
Enthusiasm is the most important thing in life.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Passion, Enthusiasm
We’re all of us guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Humankind, Humanity
Time is the longest distance between two places.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Time, Time Management
To be free is to have achieved your life.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Achievement
Every artist has a basic premise pervading his whole life, and that premise can provide the impulse to everything he creates. For me the dominating premise has been the need for understanding and tenderness and fortitude among individuals trapped by circumstance.
—Tennessee Williams
There is a time for departure, even when there’s no certain place to go.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Uncertainty, Doubt, Time, Life, Moving on, Change
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
Topics: Death, Time, Medicine
But I think the spirit of man is a good adversary
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Spirit
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
Topics: Creativity
Security is a kind of death.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Kind, Security, Safety, Death
Life is all memory except for the one present moment that goes by so quick you can hardly catch it going.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Memories, Memory, Generations
I can’t stand a naked light bulb, any more than I can a rude remark or a vulgar action.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Kindness
We have to distrust each other. It is our only defense against betrayal.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Defense, Doubt, Betrayal
A high station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Wealth
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
Topics: Sincerity
Make voyages. Attempt them. There’s nothing else.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Perspective, Moving on, Risk
High station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace.
—Tennessee Williams
All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: God
Once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle, you are equipped with the basic means of salvation.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Difficulty
The most dangerous word in any human tongue is the word for brother. It’s inflammatory.
—Tennessee Williams
Oh, Jacques, we’re used to each other, we’re a pair of captive hawks caught in the same cage, and so we’ve grown used to each other. That’s what passes for love at this dim, shadowy end of the Camino Real.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Love
Don’t look forward to the day when you stop suffering. Because when it comes, you’ll know you’re dead.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Adversity, Difficulties
Oh you weak, beautiful people who give up with such grace. What you need is someone to take hold of you
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Help
I wrote because I had to. I couldn’t stop. There wasn’t anything else I could do. If no one ever bought anything, anything I ever did, I’d still be writing. It’s beyond a compulsion.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Talents, Abilities, Work
Life is an unanswered question, but let’s still believe in the dignity and importance of the question.
—Tennessee Williams
Topics: Life, Dignity
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- William Motter Inge American Playwright
- Marsha Norman American Playwright
- Thornton Wilder American Novelist, Dramatist
- Lillian Hellman American Playwright
- Arthur Miller American Playwright
- Langston Hughes American Poet, Writer
- Clare Boothe Luce American Playwright
- William Saroyan American Playwright, Novelist
- Edna St. Vincent Millay American Poet
- Natalie Clifford Barney American Literary Figure
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