Quotes from A Streetcar Named Desire

“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, quote from A Streetcar Named Desire

“I don't want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don't tell the truth, I tell what ought to be the truth. And it that's sinful, then let me be damned for it!”
― Tennessee Williams, quote from A Streetcar Named Desire

“I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”
― Tennessee Williams, quote from A Streetcar Named Desire

“Don't you just love those long rainy afternoons in New Orleans when an hour isn't just an hour - but a little piece of eternity dropped into your hands - and who knows what to do with it?”
― Tennessee Williams, quote from A Streetcar Named Desire

“Some things are not forgiveable. Deliberate cruelty is not forgiveable. It is the most unforgiveable thing in my opinion, and the one thing in which I have never, ever been guilty.”
― Tennessee Williams, quote from A Streetcar Named Desire

“I don't want realism. I want magic!”
― Tennessee Williams, quote from A Streetcar Named Desire

“Physical beauty is passing - a transitory possession - but beauty of the mind, richness of the spirit, tenderness of the heart - I have all these things - aren't taken away but grow! Increase with the years!”
― Tennessee Williams, quote from A Streetcar Named Desire

“Oh, you can't describe someone you're in love with!”
― Tennessee Williams, quote from A Streetcar Named Desire

“Show me a person who hasn´t known any sorrow and I´ll show you a superficial.”
― Tennessee Williams, quote from A Streetcar Named Desire

“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. It was like you suddenly turned a blinding on something that had always been half in shadow, that's how it struck the world for me. But I was unlucky. Deluded.”
― Tennessee Williams, quote from A Streetcar Named Desire

“Well, honey, a shot never does a coke any harm!”
― Tennessee Williams, quote from A Streetcar Named Desire

“I can't stand a naked light bulb, any more than I can a rude remark or a vulgar action.”
― Tennessee Williams, quote from A Streetcar Named Desire

“They told me to take a streetcar named Desire and then transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at - Elysian Fields!”
― Tennessee Williams, quote from A Streetcar Named Desire

“We've had this date with each other from the beginning.”
― Tennessee Williams, quote from A Streetcar Named Desire

“Never inside, I didn't lie in my heart...”
― Tennessee Williams, quote from A Streetcar Named Desire

“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, quote from A Streetcar Named Desire

“I know I fib a good deal. After all, a woman's charm is fifty per cent illusion, but when a thing is important I tell the truth.
- Blanche Scene II”
― Tennessee Williams, quote from A Streetcar Named Desire

“Stanley:
Delicate piece she is.
Stella:
She is. She was. You didn't know Blanche as a girl. Nobody, nobody, was tender and trusting as she was. But people like you abused her, and forced her to change.”
― Tennessee Williams, quote from A Streetcar Named Desire

“I don't want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic. I try to give that to people. I do misrepresent things. I don't tell truths. I tell what ought to be truth.”
― Tennessee Williams, quote from A Streetcar Named Desire

“Stella:
And when he comes back I cry on his lap like a baby..
[she smiles to herself]
Blanche:
I guess that is what is meant by being in love..”
― Tennessee Williams, quote from A Streetcar Named Desire

“When I was sixteen, I made the discovery -- love. All at once and much, much too completely. It was like you suddenly turned a blinding light on something that had always been half in shadow, that's how it struck the world for me.”
― Tennessee Williams, quote from A Streetcar Named Desire

“-You're simple, straightforward and honest, a little bit on the primitive side, I should think. To interest you a woman would have to...
-To lay her cards out on the table.”
― Tennessee Williams, quote from A Streetcar Named Desire

“Blanche:
No, I have the misfortune of being an English instructor. I attempt to instill a bunch of bobby-soxers and drugstore Romeos with a reverence for Hawthorne and Whitman and Poe!”
― Tennessee Williams, quote from A Streetcar Named Desire

“He acts like an animal, has an animal's habits! Eats like one, moves like one, talks like one! There's even something -sub-human -something not quite to the stage of humanity yet! Yes, something - ape-like about him, like one of those pictures I've seen in - anthropological studies! Thousands and thousands of years have passed him right by, and there he is - Stanley Kowalski - survivor of the Stone Age! Bearing the raw meat home from the kill in the jungle! And you - you here - waiting for him! Maybe he'll strike you or maybe grunt and kiss you! That is, if kisses have been discovered yet! Night falls and the other apes gather! There in the front of the cave, all grunting like him, and swilling and gnawing and hulking! His poker night! - you call it - this party of apes! Somebody growls - some creature snatches at something - the fight is on! God! Maybe we are a long way from beng made in God's image, but Stella - my sister - there has been some progress since then! Such things as art - as poetry and music - such kinds of new light have come into the world since then! In some kinds of people some tendered feelings have had some little beginning! That we have got to make grow! And cling to, and hold as our flag! In this dark march towards what-ever it is we're approaching . . . Don't - don't hang back with the brutes!”
― Tennessee Williams, quote from A Streetcar Named Desire

“[Her delicate beauty must avoid a strong light. There is something about her uncertain manner, as well as her white clothes, that suggests a moth.]”
― Tennessee Williams, quote from A Streetcar Named Desire

“I'll tell you what I want. Magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misinterpret things to them. I don't tell the truth. I tell what ought to be truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it! - Don't turn the light on!”
― Tennessee Williams, quote from A Streetcar Named Desire

“...most writers, and most other artists, too, are primarily motivated in their desperate vocation by a desire to find and to separate truth from the complex of lies and evasions they live in, and I think that this impulse is what makes their work not so much a profession as a vocation, a true calling.”
― Tennessee Williams, quote from A Streetcar Named Desire

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Popular quotes

“And I told him, if I am so hard to love, then let me run wild.
My love is not a testament to my surrender. I will show you just how much I love you, with the inward draw of every breath—the collective sigh of the world and all its despair. But I will never give you what you want in chains.”
― Lang Leav, quote from The Universe of Us

“We shape each other to be human.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Birthday of the World and Other Stories

“You can't base your decisions on anyone's opinion but yours and God's.”
― Karen Kingsbury, quote from Redemption

“The drive of his own nature to keep developing prevents him from believing that anything is final and complete, yet everything he encounters behaves as though it were final and complete. He suspects that the given order of things is not as solid as it pretends to be; no thing, no self, no form, no principle, is safe, everything is undergoing an invisible but ceaseless transformation, the unsettled holds more of the future than the settled, and the present is nothing but a hypothesis that has not yet been surmounted. What better can he do than hold himself apart from the world, in the good sense exemplified by the scientist's guarded attitude toward facts that might be tempting him to premature conclusions? Hence he hesitates in trying to make something of himself; a character, a profession, a fixed mode of being, are for him concepts that already shadow forth the outlines of the skeleton, which is all that will be left of him in the end.”
― Robert Musil, quote from The Man Without Qualities: Vol. 1

“It is indisputable that the being whose capacities of enjoyment are low, has the greatest chance of having them fully satisfied; and a highly endowed being will always feel that any happiness which he can look for, as the world is constituted, is imperfect. But he can learn to bear its imperfections, if they are at all bearable; and they will not make him envy the being who is indeed unconscious of the imperfections, but only because he feels not at all the good which those imperfections qualify.

It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is only because they only know their own side of the question.”
― John Stuart Mill, quote from Utilitarianism

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