Thomas Lanier Williams III, known by his pen name Tennessee Williams, was an American playwright. Profoundly inspirational Tennessee Williams quotes will challenge the way you think, change the way you live and transform your whole life.

If you’re searching for quotes from greatest authors that perfectly capture what you’d like to say or just want to feel inspired yourself, browse through an amazing collection of quotes from Tom Robbins, powerful Toni Morrison quotes and famous Wendell Berry quotes.

Famous Tennessee Williams Quotes

All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness. Tennessee Williams

The future is called perhaps, which is the only possible thing to call the future. And the only important thing is not to allow that to scare you. Tennessee Williams

There is a time for departure even when there’s no certain place to go. Tennessee Williams

All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness. Tennessee Williams

There comes a time when you look into the mirror and you realize that what you see is all that you will ever be. And then you accept it. Or you kill yourself. Or you stop looking in mirrors. Tennessee Williams

Don’t look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you’ll know you’re dead. Tennessee Williams

If you can’t be yourself, what’s the point of being anyone else? Tennessee Williams

Mendacity is a system that we live in. Tennessee Williams

Nobody sees anybody truly, but all through the flaws of their own ego. Tennessee Williams

We are all civilized people, which means that we are all savages at heart but observing a few amenities of civilized behaviour. Tennessee Williams

There are no good or bad people. Some are a little better or a little worse, but all are activated more by misunderstanding than malice. A blindness to what is going on in each other’s hearts. Tennessee Williams

I can’t expose a human weakness on the stage unless I know it through having it myself. Tennessee Williams

Friends are God’s way of apologizing to us for our families. Tennessee Williams

Time doesn’t take away from friendship, nor does separation. Tennessee Williams

The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that’s also a hypocrite! Tennessee Williams

If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels. Tennessee Williams

What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it’s curved like a road through mountains. 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

Not facing a fire doesn’t put it out. Tennessee Williams

America has only three cities New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland. Tennessee Williams

The only unforgivable sin is deliberate cruelty. Tennessee Williams

Friends are God’s way of apologizing to us for our families. Tennessee Williams

I don’t want realism. I want magic! Tennessee Williams

Success and failure are equally disastrous. Tennessee Williams

The object of art is to make eternal the desperately fleeting moment. Tennessee Williams

All pretty girls are a trap, a pretty trap, and men expect them to be. Tennessee Williams

To change is to live, to live is to change, and not to change is to die. Tennessee Williams

Don’t look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you’ll know you’re dead. Tennessee Williams

I don’t believe in original sin. I don’t believe in guilt. I don’t believe in villains or heroes only right or wrong ways that individuals have taken, not by choice but by necessity or by certain still uncomprehended influences in themselves, their circumstances, and their antecedents. This is so simple I’m ashamed to say it, but I’m sure it’s true. In fact, I would bet my life on it! And that’s why I don’t understand why our propaganda machines are always trying to teach us, to persuade us, to hate and fear other people on the same little world that we live in. Tennessee Williams

Everybody has problems, not just you, but practically everybody has got some problems. You think of yourself as having the only problems, as being the only one who is disappointed. Tennessee Williams

Enthusiasm is the most important thing in life. 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. Tennessee Williams

We are all of us born, live and die in the shadow of a giant question mark that refers to three questions Where do we come from? Why? And where, oh where, are we going! Tennessee Williams

Perhaps it was a familiar bit of music. Perhaps it was only a piece of transparent glass. Tennessee Williams

Life is partly what we make it, and partly what it is made by the friends we choose. Tennessee Williams

And funerals are pretty compared to deaths. Tennessee Williams

If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels. Tennessee Williams

She lives in a world of her own a world of little glass ornaments. Tennessee Williams

Don’t look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you’ll know you’re dead. Tennessee Williams

The cities swept about me like dead leaves, leaves that were brightly colored but torn away from the branches. I would have stopped, but I was pursued by something. Tennessee Williams

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

People are not so dreadful when you know them. That’s what you have to remember! Tennessee Williams

You can be young without money but you can’t be old without it. Tennessee Williams

Anything might have been anything else and had as much meaning to it. Tennessee Williams

Success is blocked by concentrating on it and planning for it. Success is shy it won’t come out while you’re watching. Tennessee Williams

I suppose I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person. But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people really. Tennessee Williams

Luck is believing you’re lucky. 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. Tennessee Williams

America has only three cities New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland. Tennessee Williams

It is much easier to give money than love. Tennessee Williams

Success and failure are equally disastrous. Tennessee Williams

We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love. Tennessee Williams

Snatching the eternal out of the desperately fleeting is the great magic trick of human existence. Tennessee Williams

The world is violent and mercurial it will have its way with you. Tennessee Williams

At the age of fourteen I discovered writing as an escape from a world of reality in which I felt acutely uncomfortable. Tennessee Williams

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

The future is called perhaps, which is the only possible thing to call the future. And the important thing is not to allow that to scare you. 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 scene is memory and is therefore nonrealistic. Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart. Tennessee Williams

We’ve had this date with each other from the beginning. Tennessee Williams

We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life. Tennessee Williams

Everybody is nothing until you love them. Tennessee Williams

Revolution only needs good dreamers who remember their dreams. 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. Tennessee Williams

Don’t you think there is always something unspoken between two people? Tennessee Williams

Life is an unanswered question, but let’s still believe in the dignity and importance of the question. Tennessee Williams

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. Tennessee Williams

Life is partly what we make it, and partly what it is made by the friends we choose. Tennessee Williams

Nothing’s more determined than a cat on a hot tin roof. Tennessee Williams

When I write I don’t aim to shock people, and I’m surprised when I do. Tennessee Williams

Life is an unanswered question, but let’s still believe in the dignity and importance of the question. Tennessee Williams

But I don’t think that anything that occurs in life should be omitted from art, though the artist should present it in a fashion that is artistic and not ugly. Tennessee Williams

Everybody is nothing until you love them. Tennessee Williams

I don’t believe in original sin. I don’t believe in guilt. I don’t believe in villains or heroes only right or wrong ways that individuals have taken. Tennessee Williams

Talent? What is talent but the ability to get away with something? Tennessee Williams

Hell is yourself and the only redemption is when a person puts himself aside to feel deeply for another person. Tennessee Williams

A prayer for the wild at heart kept in cages. Tennessee Williams

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! Tennessee Williams

I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person. But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people really. Tennessee Williams

I think that hate is a feeling that can only exist where there is no understanding. Tennessee Williams

I have always been more interested in creating a character that contains something crippled. I think nearly all of us have some kind of defect. Tennessee Williams

Make voyages. Attempt them. There’s nothing else. Tennessee Williams

Time doesn’t take away from true friendship, nor does separation. Tennessee Williams

Has it ever struck you that life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quick you hardly catch it going? Tennessee Williams

Caged birds accept each other, but flight is what they long for. Tennessee Williams

Being disappointed is one thing and being discouraged is something else. I am disappointed but I am not discouraged. Tennessee Williams

In memory everything seems to happen to music. Tennessee Williams

I didn’t go to the moon, I went much further. Tennessee Williams

Men don’t want anything they get too easy. But on the other hand, men lose interest quickly. Tennessee Williams

When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone. Tennessee Williams

Don’t you just love these long rainy afternoons in New Orleans when an hour isn’t just an hour but a little bit of eternity dropped in your hands and who knows what to do with it? Tennessee Williams

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. Tennessee Williams

The post 94+ Best Tennessee Williams Quotes: Exclusive Selection appeared first on BayArt.