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"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."
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"Discovery is meant to fill in the need of the society."

"That's all YOU know,' said Digory. 'It's because you're a girl. Girls never want to know anything but gossip and rot about people getting engaged."

"I like it because when people use a lot of poker lingo, it usually means they've been playing the game for a while. Which is why I immediately avoid those people."

"Give me a few minutes."You have time. He sat in the grass."Are you just going to sit there and watch me?"Yes. Watching pretty peasant girls is what we poor little rich boys do best."Peasant?He shrugged. "You started the name calling."

"There are now babies being born in our hospitals with crack or heroin habits, come on, fuck, no one would have dreamt such a horrible thing would happen to a newborn babies in Scotland. I didn't think the sons and daughters, mothers and fathers of Scotland would have been messed up in such a nasty circle of misery, depression, violence, suicides and prisons because of drugs."

"People will be jealous of you for anything. Do bad and they will be jealous of you for being bad, do good and they will be jealous of you for being good, pull yourself up out of the ashes and they will be jealous of your strength, work hard and succeed and they will be jealous of your perseverance, buy new shoes and people will want to steal them, grow your hair long and people with want to cut it, laugh out loud and people will be jealous of your reasons for laughing. The truth is that envy is not because of you; but envy is in the eye of the beholder!"
Explore more quotes by 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."


"I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion."


"I think that [William] Faulkner and I each had to escape certain particulars of our lives, and we found salvation through words. I understand the Bible story of Babel so much better now. I think that moments of extremity, desires of escape, lead us to foreign languages--not those learned in schools, but those plucked from the human heart, the searing conditions of isolation. I did not have to be limited to my biography because of words, and I shared this with Faulkner, who invented new words and punctuation and expression and worlds. He utterly reshaped the world."


"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."


"When things don't change, their sameness becomes an accretion. That is why all society puts on flesh. Succumbs to the cubicles and begins to fill them."


"Once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle, you are equipped with the basic means of salvation."


"I have always been pushed by the negative. The apparent failure of a play sends me back to my typewriter that very night, before the reviews are out. I am more compelled to get back to work than if I had a success."


"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!"
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