Tennessee Williams Quotes

Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going.

If you can't be yourself, what's the point of being anyone else?

To change is to live, to live is to change, and not to change is to die.

There is a time for departure even when there's no certain place to go.

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.

All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.

If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels.

Friends are God's way of apologizing to us for our families

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.

Not facing a fire doesn't put it out.

The object of art is to make eternal the desperately fleeting moment.

Don't look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you'll know you're dead.

I don't want realism. I want magic!

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.

The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that's also a hypocrite!

Life is partly what we make it, and partly what it is made by the friends we choose.

The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.

You can be young without money but you can't be old without it.

The only unforgivable sin is deliberate cruelty.

Life is an unanswered question, but let's still believe in the dignity and importance of the question.

Snatching the eternal out of the desperately fleeting is the great magic trick of human existence.

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.

Enthusiasm is the most important thing in life.

We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.

A prayer for the wild at heart kept in cages.