Best Tennessee Williams Quotes
Tennessee Williams Quotes About Love, Life, Memory, Writing, Time, Family, Glass Menagerie, New Orleans, The world is Violent & Friendship! Tennessee Williams, an award-winning writer from the United States, is considered one of the twentieth century’s greatest playwrights. On March 26, 1911, in Columbus, Mississippi, a boy named Thomas Lanier Williams was born.
Having grown up in an unstable household, he relied on writing to deal with the trauma of his youth. In a contest sponsored by The Smart Set magazine in 1927, Williams first saw literary success, placing third. At the University of Missouri in 1929, he saw a performance of Ghosts and decided to pursue a career in playwriting. Despite this, he was compelled to drop out of college and begin working at the International Shoe Company because of his father’s decision.
It was enough to create a mental collapse. Before moving to New Orleans to start his new life, he finished his studies and returned to his family. The first several years of his life were spent wandering the world, performing menial occupations to get money. He made his stage debut called ‘The Glass Menagerie, which was awarded the prestigious ‘New York Critics Circle Awards. His second play, ‘A Streetcar Named Desire,’ brought him even more success. It received several accolades, including the prestigious Pulitzer Prize.
The following two decades were the most successful of his career, as he had many achievements. Tennessee Williams died on February 24, 1983, after choking on a bottle cap in his New York City apartment at the Hotel Elysee. In addition to 25 full-length plays, Williams wrote scores of short plays and screenplays, two novels, a novella, 60 short stories, over one hundred poems, and an autobiography.
Best Tennessee Williams Quotes
1. “The future is called “perhaps”, which is the only possible thing to call the future. And the only important thing is not to allow that to scare you.” -Tennessee Williams
2. “Snatching the eternal out of the desperately fleeting is the great magic trick of human existence.” -Tennessee Williams
3. “All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.” -Tennessee Williams
4. “Don’t look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you’ll know you’re dead.” -Tennessee Williams
5. “Mendacity is a system that we live in.” -Tennessee Williams
6. “We are all civilized people, which means that we are all savages at heart but observing a few amenities of civilized behaviour.” -Tennessee Williams
7. “A prayer for the wild at heart kept in cages. I know how you long to run wild and free.” -Tennessee Williams
8. “I can’t expose a human weakness on the stage unless I know it through having it myself.” -Tennessee Williams
9. “Time doesn’t take away from friendship, nor does separation.” -Tennessee Williams
10. “If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels.” -Tennessee Williams
11. “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
12. “America has only three cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland.” -Tennessee Williams
13. “Friends are God’s way of apologizing to us for our families.” -Tennessee Williams
14. “Success and failure are equally disastrous.” -Tennessee Williams
15. “All pretty girls are a trap, a pretty trap, and men expect them to be.” -Tennessee Williams
16. “People go to the movies instead of moving.” -Tennessee Williams
17. “For nowadays the world is lit by lightning!” -Tennessee Williams
18. “Don’t look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you’ll know you’re dead.” -Tennessee Williams
19. “Everybody has problems, not just you, but practically everybody has got some problems. You think of yourself as having the only problems, as being the only one who is disappointed.” -Tennessee Williams
20. ” 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.” -Tennessee Williams
21. “Perhaps it was a familiar bit of music. Perhaps it was only a piece of transparent glass.” -Tennessee Williams
22. “And funerals are pretty compared to deaths.” -Tennessee Williams
23. “She lives in a world of her own – a world of – little glass ornaments…” -Tennessee Williams
24. “The cities swept about me like dead leaves, leaves that were brightly colored but torn away from the branches. I would have stopped, but I was pursued by something.” -Tennessee Williams
25. “People are not so dreadful when you know them. That’s what you have to remember!” -Tennessee Williams
26. “Anything might have been anything else and had as much meaning to it.” -Tennessee Williams
27. “I suppose 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
28. “Nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own egos. That is the way we all see …each other in life.” -Tennessee Williams
29. “It is much easier to give money than love.” -Tennessee Williams
30. “We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.” -Tennessee Williams
