Quote

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.

Tennessee Williams

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Tennessee Williams
Age: 70 †
Born: 1914
Born: March 26
Died: 1985
Died: February 25
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Columbus
Mississippi
Thomas Lanier Williams III
Thomas Lanier Williams
Thomas Williams
Live
Trapped
Look
Locked
Looks
Department
Way
Crisis
Window
Fire
Leavers
Call
Upstairs
House
Burns

More quotes by Tennessee Williams

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Youth must be wanton, youth must be quick, Dance to the candle while lasteth the wick.
Tennessee Williams
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Success is blocked by concentrating on it and planning for it... Success is shy - it won't come out while you're watching.
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What shouldn't you do if you're a young playwright? Don't bore the audience! I mean, even if you have to resort to totally arbitrary killing on stage, or pointless gunfire, at least it'll catch their attention and keep them awake. Just keep the thing going any way you can.
Tennessee Williams
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The work of a writer, his continuing work, depends for breath of life on a certain privacy of heart.
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People are not so dreadful when you know them. That's what you have to remember! And 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. But just look around you and you will see lots of people as disappointed as you are.
Tennessee Williams
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Perhaps the most vivid recollection of my youth is that of the local wheelmen, led by my father, stopping at our home to eat pone, sip mint juleps, and flog the field hands. This more than anything cultivated my life-long aversion to bicycles.
Tennessee Williams
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The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.
Tennessee Williams
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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
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Sorrow makes for sincerity, I think.
Tennessee Williams
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Openings come quickly, sometimes, like blue space in running clouds. A complete overcast, then a blaze of light.
Tennessee Williams
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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
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I think that hate is a feeling that can only exist where there is no understanding.
Tennessee Williams
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Success and failure are equally disastrous.
Tennessee Williams
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Personal lyricism is the outcry of prisoner to prisoner from the cell in solitary where each is confined for the duration of his life.
Tennessee Williams
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Oh you weak, beautiful people who give up with such grace. What you need is someone to take hold of you
Tennessee Williams
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To begin with, I turn back time. I reverse it to that quaint period, the thirties, when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had failed them, or they had failed their eyes, and so they were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy.
Tennessee Williams
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Nobody knew my rose of the world but me... I had too much glory. They don't want glory like that in nobody's heart
Tennessee Williams
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Hysteria is a natural phenomenon, the common denominator of the female nature. It's the female weapon and the test of a man is his ability to cope with it.
Tennessee Williams
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Go, then! Go to the moon-you selfish dreamer!
Tennessee Williams
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When I write I don't aim to shock people, and I'm surprised when I do. 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. I set out to tell the truth. And sometimes the truth is shocking.
Tennessee Williams