"If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it."
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Quote collection
Tennessee Williams quotes (page 5 of 13)
256 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"William Saroyan wrote a great play on this theme, that purity of heart is the one success worth having. "In the time of your life--live!" That time is short and it doesn't return again. It is slipping away while I write this and while you read it, and the monosyllable of the clock is Loss, loss, loss, unless you devote your heart to its opposition."
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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."
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"You see, baby, after a glass or two of wine I’m inclined to extravagance."
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"Once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle, you are equipped with the basic means of salvation."
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"Take by surprise and the world gives up resistance."
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"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."
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"Of course you always had that detached quality as if you were playing a game without much concern over whether you won or lost, and now that you've lost the game, not lost but just quit playing, you have that rare sort of charm that usually only happens in very old or hopelessly sick people, the charm of the defeated."
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"These are the intensities that one cannot live with, that he has to outgrow if he wants to survive. But who can help grieving for them? If the blood vessels could hold them, how much better to keep those early loves with us?"
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"Q.Do you have any positive message, in your opinion? A.Indeed I do think that I do. Q.Such as what? A.The crying, almost screaming, need of a great worldwide human effort to know ourselves and each other a great deal better, well enough to concede that no man has a monopoly on right or virtue any more than any man has a corner on duplicity and evil and so forth. If people, and races and nations, would start with that self-manifest truth, then I think that the world could sidestep the sort of corruption which I have involuntarily chosen as the basic, allegorical theme of my plays as a whole."
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"Not facing a fire doesn't put it out."
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"We have to distrust each other. It is our only defense against betrayal."
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"We are all civilized people, wich means that we are all savages at heart but observing a few amenities of civilized behaviour."
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"Some mystery should be left in the revelation of character in a play, just as a great deal of mystery is always left in the revelation of character in life, even in one's own character to himself."
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"I don't believe in villains or heroes, only in right or wrong ways that individuals are taken, not by choice, but by necessity or by certain still uncomprehended influences in themselves, their circumstances and their antecedents."
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"How long does it have to go on? This punishment? Haven't I done time enough, haven't I served my term? can't I apply for a-pardon?"
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"How beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken."
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"The only unforgivable sin is deliberate cruelty."
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"If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels."
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"Living with someone you love can be lonelier than living entirely alone, if the on that you love doesn't love you."
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