Quotes by Tennessee Williams

“Time doesnt take away from friendship, nor does separation.”

“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?”

“I dont ask for your pity, but just for your understanding – not even that – no. Just for some recognition of me in you, and the enemy, time, in us all.”

“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.”

“Dont look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes youll know youre dead.”

“The rest of my days Im going to spend on the sea. And when I die, Im 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 ships doctor, a very young one with a small blond moustache and a big silver watch. Poor lady, theyll say, The quinine did her no good. That unwashed grape has transported her soul to heaven.”

“Mendacity is a system that we live in, declares Brick. Liquor is one way out andeaths the other.”

“The human animal is a beast that dies and if hes 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!--Which it never can be....”

“Nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own egos. That is the way we all see ...each other in life. 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. Thats 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 others naked hearts.”