I have met a great many people, nearly all friendly, many of whom I was fairly intimate with in one way of another, but nobody has seemed as close to me in spirit as you are. That was why I thought only of you at those times when my life seemed in danger of falling to pieces.

— Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams Quotes

I don’t want realism, I want magic! Yes, yes, magic!

— Tennessee Williams

The trouble is that I am being bullied and intimidated by my own success and the fame that surrounds it and what people expect of me and their demands on me. They are forcing me out of my natural position as an artist so that I am in peril of ceasing to be an artist at all. When that happens I will be nothing because I cannot be a professional writer.

— Tennessee Williams

Ignorance – of mortality – is a comfort. A man don’t have that comfort, he’s the only living thing that conceives of death, that knows what it is.

— Tennessee Williams

The carrion birds have tried to peck out my eyes and my tongue and my mind, but they’ve never been able to get at my heart.

— Tennessee Williams

Later tonight am going to tell you that I love you and maybe by that time you will be drunk enough to believe me.

— Tennessee Williams

I like you to be exactly the way that you are, because in all my experience, I have never known anyone like you.

— Tennessee Williams

Sometimes we sleep too long in the afternoon and when we wake we find things changed, Signora.

— Tennessee Williams

And funerals are pretty compared to deaths. Funerals are quiet, but deaths – not always. Sometimes their breathing is hoarse, sometimes it rattles, sometimes they cry out to you, Don’t let me go! Even the old sometimes say, Don’t let me go! As if you were able to stop them! Funerals are quiet with pretty flowers. And oh, what gorgeous boxes they pack them away in!

— Tennessee Williams

I knew before asking the gypsy that something of this sort would happen to you. You have a spark of anarchy in your spirit and that’s not to be tolerated. Nothing wild or honest is tolerated here! It has to be extinguished or used only to light up your nose for Mr. Gutman’s amusement.

— Tennessee Williams

The last we heard of him was a picture postcard from Mazatlan, on the Pacific coast of Mexico, containing a message of two words: “Hello – Goodbye!” and no address.

— Tennessee Williams

BLANCHE: You see I still have that awful vanity about my looks even now that my looks are slipping!

— Tennessee Williams

I stayed and fought for it, bled for it, almost died for it.

— Tennessee Williams

I felt a great depression, probably because I never believed that anything would continue, would hold. I never thought my advance would maintain its ground. I always thought there would be a collapse immediately after the advance.

— Tennessee Williams

You were a wonderful lover... Such a wonderful person to go to bed with, and I think mostly because you were really indifferent to it.

— Tennessee Williams

And in the spring, it’s touching to notice them making their first discovery of love! As if nobody had ever known it before!

— Tennessee Williams

Romance

To be not alone, even for a few moments, is worth the pain and the danger.

— Tennessee Williams

But I think people always die alone... with or without relations.

— Tennessee Williams

Oh, I suppose I am sick, one of those weak and divided people who slip like shadows among you solid strong ones. But sometimes, out of necessity, we shadowy people take on a strength of our own.

— Tennessee Williams

Ignorance of mortality is a comfort.

— Tennessee Williams

You know, then, that the public Somebody you are when you “have a name” is a fiction created with mirrors and that the only somebody worth being is the solitary and unseen you that existed from your first breath and which is the sum of your actions and so is constantly in a state of becoming under your own volition – and knowing these things, you can even survive the catastrophe of Success!

— Tennessee Williams

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