Best Blanche Dubois Quotes & Sayings

Deliberate cruelty is unforgivable.

--Blanche Dubois — 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

I'll tell you what I want. Magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misinterpret things to them. I don't tell the truth. I tell what ought to be truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it! - Don't turn the light on! — Tennessee Williams

True? Yes, I suppose-unfit somehow-anyway ... So I came here. There was nowhere else I could go. I was played out. You know what played out is? My youth was suddenly gone up the water-sprout, and-I met you. You said you needed somebody. Well, I needed some-body, too. I thanked God for you, because you seemed to be gentle-a cleft in the rock of the world that I could hide in! But I guess I was asking, hoping-too much! Kiefaber, Stanley and Shaw have tied an old tin can to the tail of the kite. — Tennessee Williams

I have sometimes been sad that Tennessee Williams wrote that line for Blanche DuBois, "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers." Many of us have been saved many times by the kindness of strangers, but after a while it sounds trite, like a bumper sticker. And that's what makes me sad, that a beautiful and true line comes to be used so often that it takes on the superficial sound of a bumper sticker. — Elizabeth Strout

This woman is Pocahontas. She is Athena and Hera. Lying in this messy, unmade bed, eyes closed, this is Juliet Capulet. Blanche DuBois. Scarlett O'Hara. With ministrations of lipstick and eyeliner I give birth to Ophelia. To Marie Antoinette. Over the next trip of the larger hand around the face of the bedside clock, I give form to Lucrezia Borgia. Taking shape at my fingertips, my touches of foundation and blush, here is Jocasta. Lying here, Lady Windermere. Opening her eyes, Cleopatra. Given flesh, a smile, swinging her sculpted legs off one side of the bed, this is Helen of Troy. Yawning and stretching, here is every beautiful woman across history. — Chuck Palahniuk

When you wrote it didn't matter if hysteria sometimes came up in your face and voice (unless, of course, you let it find its way into your "literary voice") because writing was done in merciful privacy and silence. Even if you were partly out of your mind it might turn out to be all right: you could try for control even harder than Blanche Dubois was said to have tried, and with luck you could still bring off a sense of order and sanity on the page for the reader. Reading, after all, was a thing done in privacy and silence too. — Richard Yates

'Streetcar' is no longer about the moment at all. There is no Blanche DuBois anywhere; south, north, east or west. We don't have Blanche DuBois at the moment. But we have Willy Loman; everywhere we look we see Willy Loman. We are Willy Loman. We're on Facebook; we need to be known; we're selling all the time. — Mike Nichols

Never inside, I didn't lie in my heart... — Tennessee Williams