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"The human animal is a beast that dies and if he's got money he buys and buys and buys and I think the reason he buys everything he can buy is that in the back of his mind he has the crazy hope that one of his purchases will be life everlasting!--Which it never can be...."
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"God makes and apparel shapes: but it's money that finishes the man."

"Old-fashioned people think you can have a soul without money. They think the less money you have, the more soul you have. Young people nowadays know better. A soul is a very expensive thing to keep: much more so than a motor car."

"In a materialistic society, man is likely to value the opinion of a rich man over that of a poor one; even when coming to opinions that have absolutely nothing to do with moneymaking."

"It's unfortunate how some people complain about being financially unstable, yet they use their last savings to acquire material things."

"Anything you can acquire is only another thing you'll lose."

"Money gives you permission to just walk away from everything that isn't pretty and perfect. You can't put up with anything less than lovely. You spend your life running, avoiding, escaping."

"I am, indeed, an absolute materialist so far as actual belief goes; with not a shred of credence in any form of supernaturalism-religion, spiritualism, transcendentalism, metempsychosis, or immortality."

"The accouterments of life were so rich and varied, so elaborated, that almost no place at all was left for life itself. Each and every accessory was so costly and beautiful that it had an existence above and beyond the purpose it was meant to serve " confusing the observer and absorbing attention."

"If money don't buy happiness, what the hell does?"
Explore more quotes by Tennessee Williams


"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."


"Somebody said once or wrote, once: 'We're all of us children in a vast kindergarten trying to spell God's name with the wrong alphabet blocks!"


"Byron: The luxuries of this place have made me soft.The metal point's gone from my pen, there's nothing left but the feather.Gutman:That may be true.But what can you do about it?Byron:Make a departure.Gutman:From yourself?Byron:From my present self to myself as I used to be!Gutman:That's the furthest departure a man could make!"


"The last we heard of him was a picture postcard from Mazatlan, on the Pacific coast of Mexico, containing a message of two words: "Hello - Goodbye!" and no address."


"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."


"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."


"Life is all memory except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going."


"A high station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace."
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