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Authors & Writing
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-Tennessee (Thomas Lanier) Williams, Forward to Sweet Bird of Youth
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Change
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There is a time for departure even when there's no certain place to go.
-Tennessee (Thomas Lanier) Williams
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Creativity
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It is almost as if you were frantically constructing another world while the world that you live in dissolves beneath your feet, and that your survival depends on completing this construction at least one second before the old habitation collapses.
-Tennessee (Thomas Lanier) Williams
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Deception/Lying
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-Tennessee (Thomas Lanier) Williams, Forward to Sweet Bird of Youth
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Mendacity is a system that we live in. Liquor is one way out an death's the other.
-Tennessee (Thomas Lanier) Williams
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Doubt
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We have to distrust each other. It is our only defense against betrayal.
-Tennessee (Thomas Lanier) Williams
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Fellowship
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The most dangerous word in any human tongue is the word for brother. It's inflammatory.
-Tennessee (Thomas Lanier) Williams
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Freedom
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-Tennessee (Thomas Lanier) Williams, Camino Real
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God
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All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent.
-Tennessee (Thomas Lanier) Williams
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Hate
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-Tennessee (Thomas Lanier) Williams, Forward to Sweet Bird of Youth
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Help
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Oh you weak, beautiful people who give up with such grace. What you need is someone to take hold of you
-Tennessee (Thomas Lanier) Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955)
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I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.
-Tennessee (Thomas Lanier) Williams, Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire
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Home
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-Tennessee (Thomas Lanier) Williams
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Honesty
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All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.
-Tennessee (Thomas Lanier) Williams
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Humanity
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We're all of us guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.
-Tennessee (Thomas Lanier) Williams
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Hypocrisy
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The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that's also a hypocrite!
-Tennessee (Thomas Lanier) Williams
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Kindness
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I can't stand a naked light bulb, any more than I can a rude remark or a vulgar action.
-Tennessee (Thomas Lanier) Williams
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Loneliness
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When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.
-Tennessee (Thomas Lanier) Williams
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We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.
-Tennessee (Thomas Lanier) Williams
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Love
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Oh, Jacques, we're used to each other, we're a pair of captive hawks caught in the same cage, and so we've grown used to each other. That's what passes for love at this dim, shadowy end of the Camino Real.
-Tennessee (Thomas Lanier) Williams
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Medicine
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Time rushes toward us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation.
-Tennessee (Thomas Lanier) Williams
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Memory
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Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going.
-Tennessee (Thomas Lanier) Williams
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In memory everything seems to happen to music.
-Tennessee (Thomas Lanier) Williams
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Money
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You can be young without money but you can't be old without it.
-Tennessee (Thomas Lanier) Williams
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Motivational
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I have always been pushed by the negative. The apparent failure of a play sends me back to my typewriter that very night, before the reviews are out. I am more compelled to get back to work than if I had a success.
-Tennessee (Thomas Lanier) Williams
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Nature
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A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with.
-Tennessee (Thomas Lanier) Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955)
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Revolution
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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 (Thomas Lanier) Williams
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Sincerity
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Everyone says he's sincere, but everyone isn't sincere. If everyone was sincere who says he's sincere there wouldn't be half so many insincere ones in the world and there would be lots, lots, lots more really sincere ones!
-Tennessee (Thomas Lanier) Williams
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Society
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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.
-Tennessee (Thomas Lanier) Williams
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Solitude
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We're all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life!
-Tennessee (Thomas Lanier) Williams
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Success & Failure
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Luxury is the wolf at the door and its fangs are the vanities and conceits germinated by success. When an artist learns this, he knows where the danger is.
-Tennessee (Thomas Lanier) Williams
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Success and failure are equally disastrous.
-Tennessee (Thomas Lanier) Williams
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Suffering
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Don't look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you'll know you're dead.
-Tennessee (Thomas Lanier) Williams
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Time
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For time is the longest distance between two places.
-Tennessee (Thomas Lanier) Williams
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Wealth
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A high station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace.
-Tennessee (Thomas Lanier) Williams
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Women
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You've got many refinements. I don't think you need to worry about your failure at long division. I mean, after all, you got through short division, and short division is all that a lady ought to be called on to cope with.
-Tennessee (Thomas Lanier) Williams
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Books by and about Tennessee (Thomas Lanier) Williams
