Tennessee Williams (1911 – 1983)
American playwright.
Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.
All pretty girls are a trap, a pretty trap, and men expect them to be.
We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it.
Snatching the eternal out of the desperately fleeting is the great magic trick of human existence.
The theatre is a place where one has time for the problems of people to whom one would show the door if they came to one's office for a job.
Yes, movies! Look at them All of those glamorous people having adventures hogging it all, gobbling the whole thing up! You know what happens? People go to the movies instead of moving! 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! Yes, until there's a war. That's when adventure becomes available to the masses! Everyone's dish, not only Gable's! Then the people in the dark room come out of the dark room to have some adventures themselves Goody, goody! It's our turn now, to go to the south Sea Island to make a safari to be exotic, far-off! But I'm not patient. I don't want to wait till then. I'm tired of the movies and I am about to move!
The tables have turned, yes, the tables have turned with a vengeance! You've come around to my old way of thinking and I to yours like two people exchanging a call on each other at the same time, and each one finding the other one gone out, the door locked against him and no one to answer the bell!
Success is blocked by concentrating on it and planning for it ... Success is shy it won't come out while you're watching.
I know so well what becomes of unmarried women who aren't prepared to occupy a position. I've seen such pitiful cases in the South barely tolerated spinsters living upon the grudging patronage of sister's husband or brother's wife! stuck away in some little mouse-trap of a room encouraged by one in-law to visit another little birdlike women without any nest eating the crust of humility all their life! Is that the future that we've mapped out for ourselves?
I took that horrible novel back to the library yes! That hideous book by that insane Mr. Lawrence. I cannot control the output of diseased minds or people who cater to them BUT I WON'T ALLOW SUCH FILTH BROUGHT INTO MY HOUSE! No, no, no, no, no!
You don't know things anywhere! You live in a dream; you manufacture illusions!
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!
Things have a way of turning out so badly.
Well, now I've said it, my son was looking for God. I mean for a clear image of Him. He spent that whole blazing equatorial day in the crow's nest of the schooner watching that thing on the beach of the Encantadas till it was too dark to see it, and when he came back down the rigging, he said, Well, now I've seen Him!and he meant God . . .
When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.
Mother, when you're disappointed, you get that awful suffering look on your face, like the picture of Jesus' mother in the museum!
We're all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.
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."
All of my gentlemen callers were sons of planters and of course I assumed that I would be married to one and raise my family on a large piece of land with plenty of servants. But man proposes and woman accepts the proposal! To vary that old, old saying a little bit I married no planter! I married a man who worked for the telephone company!
Why you're not crippled, you just have a little defect hardly noticeable, even! When people have some slight disadvantage like that, they cultivate other things to make up for it develop charm and vivacity and charm!