Tennessee Williams

“All of us are guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.”

“When something is Festering on your memory or in your imagination, laws of silence don't work, it's just like shutting a door and locking it on a house on fire in hope of forgetting that the house is burning. But not facing a fire doesn't put it out. Silence about a thing just magnifies it. It grows and festers in silence, becomes malignant...”

“Chance, you've gone past something you couldn't afford to go past; your time, your youth, you've passed it. It's all you had and you've had it.”

“When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I'm only really alive when I'm writing.”

“The different people are not like other people, but being different is nothing to be ashamed of. Because other people are not such wonderful people. They're one hundred times one thousand. You're one times one! They walk all over the earth. You just stay here.”

“You'll be surprised how infinitely merciful they [these tablets] are. The prescription number is 96814. I think of it as the telephone number of God!”

“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.”

“Mendacity is a system that we live in," declares Brick. "Liquor is one way out an'death's the other.”

“We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.”

“Laws of silence don’t work…. When something is festering in your memory or your imagination, laws of silence don’t work, it’s just like shutting a door and locking it on a house on fire in hope of forgetting that the house is burning. But not facing a fire doesn’t put it out.”

“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.”

“The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.”

“For time is the longest distance between two places.”

“The apartment faces an alley and is entered by a fire-escape, a structure whose name is a touch of accidental poetic truth, for all of these huge buildings are always burning with the slow and implacable fires of human desperation.”

“In memory everything seems to happen to music.”

“...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...”

“We're all of us guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.”

“לא ראיתי מעודי אישה יפה יותר. עיניים גדולות וגוון עור של קרם.”

“בתיאטרון יש מקום לבעיותיהם של אנשים שאותם היו מגרשים מלשכת התעסוקה.”

“הביטחון העצמי שבו אני חש, בעיקר תחת השפעת יין בצוהריים, אינו אלא העמדת פנים.”