Thomas Lanier Williams III, known by his pen name Tennessee Williams, was an American playwright. Profoundly inspirational Tennessee Williams quotes will challenge the way you think, change the way you live and transform your whole life.
If you’re searching for quotes from greatest authors that perfectly capture what you’d like to say or just want to feel inspired yourself, browse through an amazing collection of quotes from Tom Robbins, powerful Toni Morrison quotes and famous Wendell Berry quotes.
Famous Tennessee Williams Quotes
All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness. Tennessee Williams
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
There is a time for departure even when there’s no certain place to go. Tennessee Williams
All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness. Tennessee Williams
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
Don’t look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you’ll know you’re dead. Tennessee Williams
If you can’t be yourself, what’s the point of being anyone else? Tennessee Williams
Mendacity is a system that we live in. Tennessee Williams
Nobody sees anybody truly, but all through the flaws of their own ego. Tennessee Williams
We are all civilized people, which means that we are all savages at heart but observing a few amenities of civilized behaviour. 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
I can’t expose a human weakness on the stage unless I know it through having it myself. Tennessee Williams
Friends are God’s way of apologizing to us for our families. Tennessee Williams
Time doesn’t take away from friendship, nor does separation. Tennessee Williams
The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that’s also a hypocrite! Tennessee Williams
If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels. Tennessee Williams
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. 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
Not facing a fire doesn’t put it out. Tennessee Williams
America has only three cities New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland. Tennessee Williams
The only unforgivable sin is deliberate cruelty. Tennessee Williams
Friends are God’s way of apologizing to us for our families. Tennessee Williams
I don’t want realism. I want magic! Tennessee Williams
Success and failure are equally disastrous. Tennessee Williams
The object of art is to make eternal the desperately fleeting moment. Tennessee Williams
All pretty girls are a trap, a pretty trap, and men expect them to be. Tennessee Williams
To change is to live, to live is to change, and not to change is to die. Tennessee Williams
Don’t look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you’ll know you’re dead. Tennessee Williams
I don’t believe in original sin. I don’t believe in guilt. I don’t believe in villains or heroes only right or wrong ways that individuals have taken, not by choice but by necessity or by certain still uncomprehended influences in themselves, their circumstances, and their antecedents. This is so simple I’m ashamed to say it, but I’m sure it’s true. In fact, I would bet my life on it! And that’s why I don’t understand why our propaganda machines are always trying to teach us, to persuade us, to hate and fear other people on the same little world that we live in. Tennessee Williams
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
Enthusiasm is the most important thing in life. 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. Tennessee Williams
We are all of us born, live and die in the shadow of a giant question mark that refers to three questions Where do we come from? Why? And where, oh where, are we going! Tennessee Williams
Perhaps it was a familiar bit of music. Perhaps it was only a piece of transparent glass. Tennessee Williams
Life is partly what we make it, and partly what it is made by the friends we choose. Tennessee Williams
And funerals are pretty compared to deaths. Tennessee Williams
If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels. Tennessee Williams
She lives in a world of her own a world of little glass ornaments. Tennessee Williams
Don’t look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you’ll know you’re dead. Tennessee Williams
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
Living with someone you love can be lonelier than living entirely alone, if the on that you love doesn’t love you. Tennessee Williams
People are not so dreadful when you know them. That’s what you have to remember! Tennessee Williams
You can be young without money but you can’t be old without it. Tennessee Williams
Anything might have been anything else and had as much meaning to it. Tennessee Williams
Success is blocked by concentrating on it and planning for it. Success is shy it won’t come out while you’re watching. Tennessee Williams
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
Luck is believing you’re lucky. Tennessee Williams
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
America has only three cities New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland. Tennessee Williams
It is much easier to give money than love. Tennessee Williams
Success and failure are equally disastrous. Tennessee Williams
We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love. Tennessee Williams
Snatching the eternal out of the desperately fleeting is the great magic trick of human existence. Tennessee Williams
The world is violent and mercurial it will have its way with you. 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
That’s how it is in all living relationships except when there is that rare case of two people who love intensely enough to burn through all those layers of opacity and see each other’s naked hearts. 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
In all these years, you never believed I loved you. And I did. I did so much. I did love you. I even loved your hate and your hardness. 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
We’ve had this date with each other from the beginning. Tennessee Williams
We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life. Tennessee Williams
Everybody is nothing until you love them. Tennessee Williams
Revolution only needs good dreamers who remember their dreams. 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. Tennessee Williams
Don’t you think there is always something unspoken between two people? Tennessee Williams
Life is an unanswered question, but let’s still believe in the dignity and importance of the question. 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
Life is partly what we make it, and partly what it is made by the friends we choose. Tennessee Williams
Nothing’s more determined than a cat on a hot tin roof. Tennessee Williams
When I write I don’t aim to shock people, and I’m surprised when I do. Tennessee Williams
Life is an unanswered question, but let’s still believe in the dignity and importance of the question. Tennessee Williams
But I don’t think that anything that occurs in life should be omitted from art, though the artist should present it in a fashion that is artistic and not ugly. Tennessee Williams
Everybody is nothing until you love them. Tennessee Williams
I don’t believe in original sin. I don’t believe in guilt. I don’t believe in villains or heroes only right or wrong ways that individuals have taken. Tennessee Williams
Talent? What is talent but the ability to get away with something? Tennessee Williams
Hell is yourself and the only redemption is when a person puts himself aside to feel deeply for another person. Tennessee Williams
A prayer for the wild at heart kept in cages. Tennessee Williams
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
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
I think that hate is a feeling that can only exist where there is no understanding. Tennessee Williams
I have always been more interested in creating a character that contains something crippled. I think nearly all of us have some kind of defect. Tennessee Williams
Make voyages. Attempt them. There’s nothing else. Tennessee Williams
Time doesn’t take away from true friendship, nor does separation. Tennessee Williams
Has it ever struck you that life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quick you hardly catch it going? Tennessee Williams
Caged birds accept each other, but flight is what they long for. Tennessee Williams
Being disappointed is one thing and being discouraged is something else. I am disappointed but I am not discouraged. Tennessee Williams
In memory everything seems to happen to music. Tennessee Williams
I didn’t go to the moon, I went much further. Tennessee Williams
Men don’t want anything they get too easy. But on the other hand, men lose interest quickly. Tennessee Williams
When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone. Tennessee Williams
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
You are the only young man that I know of who ignores the fact that the future becomes the present, the present the past, and the past turns into everlasting regret if you don’t plan for it. Tennessee Williams
