Tennessee Williams Love Quotes & Sayings

Oh, you weak, beautiful people who give up with such grace. What you need is someone to take hold of you
gently, with love, and hand your life back to you, like something gold you let go of
and I can! I'm determined to do it
and nothing's more determined than a cat on a tin roof
is there? — Tennessee Williams

You two had something that had to be kept on ice, yes, incorruptible, yes!
and death was the only icebox where you could keep it ... — Tennessee Williams

I love Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Flannery O'Connor. I read a lot of American writers. — Kiran Desai

You love your people but you don't understand them. They find God in each other. And when they lose each other, they lose God and they're lost. And it's hard to help them — Tennessee Williams

Man is by instinct a lover, a hunter, a fighter. — 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

American naturalism is what my indulgent actor side loves: a bit of Tennessee Williams, a bit of Clifford Odets, August Wilson - I would just love to tackle some of that. — Emilia Clarke

Living with someone you love can be lonelier than living entirely alone, if the one that you love doesn't love you. — Tennessee Williams

I met her last summer on a moonlight boat trip... — Tennessee Williams

Just another four-letter word. — Tennessee Williams

He was a boy, just a boy, when I was a very young girl. When I was sixteen, I made the discovery - love. All at once and much, much too completely. It was like you suddenly turned a blinding on something that had always been half in shadow, that's how it struck the world for me. But I was unlucky. Deluded. — Tennessee Williams

I think no more than a week after I started writing I ran into the first block. It's hard to describe it in a way that will be understandable to anyone who is not a neurotic. I will try. All my life I have been haunted by the obsession that to desire a thing or to love a thing intensely is to place yourself in a vulnerable position, to be a possible, if not a probable, loser of what you most want. Let's leave it like that. That block has always been there and always will be, and my chance of getting, or achieving, anything that I long for will always be gravely reduced by the interminable existence of that block. — Tennessee Williams

Princess, the great difference between people in this world is not between the rich and the poor or the good and the evil, the biggest of all differences in this world is between the ones that had or have the pleasure in love and those that haven't and hadn't any pleasure in love, but just watched it with envy, sick envy. The spectators and the performers. — Tennessee Williams

I try to work every day because you have no refuge but writing. When you're going through a period of unhappiness, a broken love affair, the death of someone you love, or some other disorder in your life, then you have no refuge but writing. — Tennessee Williams

CORNELIA: -Sit down. Don't leave the table.
GRACE: -Is that an order?
CORNELIA: -I don't give orders to you, I make requests.
GRACE: -Sometimes the requests of an employer are hard to distinguish from orders. [She sits down] — Tennessee Williams

All my life I have been haunted by the obsession that to desire a thing or to love a thing intensely is to place yourself in a vulnerable position, to be a possible, if not a probable, loser of what you most want. Let's leave it like that. — Tennessee Williams

Love, all at once and much, much too completely. It's like you suddenly turn a blinding light on something that had always been half a shadow ... — Tennessee Williams

Perhaps because my background is theatrical, I have a great affinity with the classics. Hamlet has always been a character of great interest to me and a character I would really love to play. Or a character in a Tennessee Williams play, maybe Tom in 'The Glass Menagerie.' — Adhir Kalyan

How calmly does the orange branch
Observe the sky begin to blanch
Without a cry, without a prayer,
With no betrayal of despair.

Sometime while night obscures the tree
The zenith of its life will be
Gone past forever, and from thence
A second history will commence.

A chronicle no longer gold,
A bargaining with mist and mould,
And finally the broken stem
The plummeting to earth; and then

An intercourse not well designed
For beings of a golden kind
Whose native green must arch above
The earth's obscene, corrupting love.

And still the ripe fruit and the branch
Observe the sky begin to blanch
Without a cry, without a prayer,
With no betrayal of despair.

O Courage, could you not as well
Select a second place to dwell,
Not only in that golden tree
But in the frightened heart of me? — Tennessee Williams

Margaret: Oh you weak people, you weak, beautiful people! - who give up. What you want is someone to [she turns out the rose-silk lamp] take hold of you. Gently, gently, with love! And I do love you, Brick, I do!
Brick [smiling with charming sadness]: Wouldn't it be funny if that was true? — Tennessee Williams

There is no pleasure in the world like writing well and going fast. It's like nothing else. It's like a love affair, it goes on and on, and doesn't end in marriage. It's all courtship. — Tennessee Williams

In all these years, you never believed I loved you. And I did. I did so much. I did love you. I even loved your hate and your hardness. — Tennessee Williams

The strongest influences in my life and my work are always whomever I love. Whomever I love and am with most of the time, or whomever I remember most vividly. I think that's true of everyone, don't you? — Tennessee Williams

This is how Resistance disfigures love. The stew it creates is rich, it's colorful; Tennessee Williams could work it up into a trilogy. But is it love? If we're the supporting partner, shouldn't we face our own failure to pursue our unlived life, rather than hitchhike on our spouse's coattails? And if we're the supported partner, shouldn't we step out from the glow of our loved one's adoration and instead encourage him to let his own light shine? — Steven Pressfield

When I was sixteen, I made the discovery
love. All at once and much, much too completely. It was like you suddenly turned a blinding light on something that had always been half in shadow, that's how it struck the world for me. — Tennessee Williams

Don't you just love those long rainy afternoons in New Orleans when an hour isn't just an hour - but a little piece of eternity dropped into your hands - and who knows what to do with it? — Tennessee Williams

As for me, no one will ever love me. But you could get used to me, couldn't you, Jimmy? — Tennessee Williams

The name of a person you love is more than language. — Tennessee Williams

The Venus flytrap, a devouring organism, aptly named for the goddess of love. — Tennessee Williams

To know me is not to love me. At — Tennessee Williams

Oh, you can't describe someone you're in love with! — Tennessee Williams

For (strange as it may sound to many people, who tend to think of critics as being motivated by the lower emotions: envy, disdain, contempt even) critics are, above all, people who are in love with beautiful things, and who worry that those things will get broken. What motivates so many of us to write in the first place is, to begin with, a great passion for a subject (Tennessee Williams, Balanchine, jazz, the twentieth-century novel, whatever) that we find beautiful; and, then, a kind of corresponding anxiety about the fragility of that beauty. — Daniel Mendelsohn

The world is violent and mercurial--it will have its way with you. We are saved only by love--love for each other and the love that we pour into the art we feel compelled to share: being a parent; being a writer; being a painter; being a friend. We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love. — Tennessee Williams

Nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own egos. That is the way we all see ... each other in life. Vanity, fear, desire, competition
all such distortions within our own egos
condition our vision of those in relation to us. Add to those distortions to our own egos the corresponding distortions in the egos of others, and you see how cloudy the glass must become through which we look at each other. That's how it is in all living relationships except when there is that rare case of two people who love intensely enough to burn through all those layers of opacity and see each other's naked hearts. — Tennessee Williams

Is a lifetime long enough to hold the regret that I have for that fantastically aborted but crazily sweet love affair? — Tennessee Williams

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 Williams

It's almost impossible for anybody to believe that they're not loved by someone they believe they love. But honey, I love nobody. — 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

When I had that attack of pleurosis - he asked me what was the matter when I came back. I said pleurosis - he thought that I said Blue Roses! So that's what he always called me after that. Whenever he saw me, he'd holler, Hello, Blue Roses! — Tennessee Williams

I hope to die in my sleep, when the time comes, and I hope it will be in the beautiful big brass bed in my New Orleans apartment, the bed which is associated with so much love. — Tennessee Williams

Everybody is nothing until you love them. — Tennessee Williams

Stella:
And when he comes back I cry on his lap like a baby..
[she smiles to herself]
Blanche:
I guess that is what is meant by being in love.. — Tennessee Williams

We have not long to love.
Light does not stay.
The tender things are those
we fold away.
Coarse fabrics are the ones
for common wear.
In silence I have watched you
comb your hair.
Intimate the silence,
dim and warm.
I could but did not, reach
to touch your arm.
I could, but do not, break
that which is still.
(Almost the faintest whisper
would be shrill.)
So moments pass as though
they wished to stay.
We have not long to love.
A night. A day ... — Tennessee Williams

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 Williams

Our can-do culture has made many of us believe that we should always be self-sufficient. Somewhere along the way, we also got the message that asking for help is a sign of weakness. We often forget that we're interdependent creatures whose very existence depends on the kindness of others, including - with a bow to Tennessee Williams - strangers. — Sharon Salzberg

The biggest of all differences in this world is between the ones that had or have pleasure in love and those that haven't and hadn't any pleasure in love, but just watched with sick envy. — Tennessee Williams

I love Tennessee Williams pieces; they are so poetic and I love period pieces. — Richard Hatch