“I've got the guts to die. What I want to know is, have you got the guts to live?”
― Tennessee Williams, quote from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
“What is the victory of a cat on a hot tin roof?—I wish I knew... Just staying on it, I guess, as long as she can...”
― Tennessee Williams, quote from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
“In all these years, you never believed I loved you. And I did. I did so much. I did love you. I even loved your hate and your hardness.”
― Tennessee Williams, quote from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
“Why is it so damn hard for people to talk?”
― Tennessee Williams, quote from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
“I'm not living with you. We occupy the same cage. (Maggie)”
― Tennessee Williams, quote from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
“Oh, you weak, beautiful people who give up with such grace. What you need is someone to take hold of you--gently, with love, and hand your life back to you, like something gold you let go of--and I can! I'm determined to do it--and nothing's more determined than a cat on a tin roof--is there?”
― Tennessee Williams, quote from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
“Time goes by so fast. Nothin' can outrun it. Death commences too early--almost before you're half-acquainted with life--you meet the other.”
― Tennessee Williams, quote from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
“Of course you always had that detached quality as if you were playing a game without much concern over whether you won or lost, and now that you've lost the game, not lost but just quit playing, you have that rare sort of charm that usually only happens in very old or hopelessly sick people, the charm of the defeated.”
― Tennessee Williams, quote from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
“Maggie, we're through with lies and liars in this house. Lock the door.”
― Tennessee Williams, quote from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
“It's like a switch, clickin' off in my head. Turns the hot light off and the cool one on, and all of a sudden there's peace.”
― Tennessee Williams, quote from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
“My only point, the only point that I'm making, is life has got to be allowed to continue even after the dream of life is--all--over....”
― Tennessee Williams, quote from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
“The human animal is a beast that dies but the fact that he’s dying don’t give him pity for others.”
― Tennessee Williams, quote from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
“How long does it have to go on? This punishment? Haven't I done time enough, haven't I served my term? can't I apply for a-pardon?”
― Tennessee Williams, quote from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
“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. Silence about a thing just magnifies it. It grows and festers in silence, becomes malignant....”
― Tennessee Williams, quote from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
“No, truth is something desperate, an' she's got it. Believe me, it's something desperate, an' she's got it.”
― Tennessee Williams, quote from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
“A drinking man's someone who wants to forget he isn't still young and believing”
― Tennessee Williams, quote from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
“I’m not good. I don’t know why people have to pretend to be good, nobody’s good.”
― Tennessee Williams, quote from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
“My head don't work any more and it's hard for me to understand how anybody could care if he lived or died or was dying or cared about anything but whether or not there was liquor left in the bottle and so I said what I said without thinking. In some ways I'm no better than the others, in some ways worse because I'm less alive. Maybe it's being alive that makes them lie, and being almost not alive that makes me sort of accidentally truthful--I don't know but--anyway--we've been friends...And being friends is telling each other the truth...”
― Tennessee Williams, quote from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
“And so tonight we're going to make the lie true, and when that's done, I'll bring the liquor back here and we'll get drunk together, here, tonight, in this place that death has come into...”
― Tennessee Williams, quote from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
“human beings dream of life everlasting, that's the reason! But most of them want it on earth and not in heaven.”
― Tennessee Williams, quote from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
“I'm a rich man, Brick, yep, I'm a mighty rich man. Y'know how much I'm worth? Guess, Brick! Guess how much I'm worth! Close to ten million in cash an' blue chip stocks, outside, mind you, of twenty-eight thousand acres of the richest land this side of the valley Nile! But a man can't buy his life with it, he can't buy back his life with it when his life has been spent, that's one thing not offered in the Europe fire-sale or in the American markets or any markets on earth, a man can't buy his life with it, he can't buy back his life when his life is finished...
Big Daddy: (pp. 65)”
― Tennessee Williams, quote from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
“Margaret: Oh you weak people, you weak, beautiful people! - who give up. What you want is someone to [she turns out the rose-silk lamp] take hold of you. Gently, gently, with love! And I do love you, Brick, I do!
Brick [smiling with charming sadness]: Wouldn't it be funny if that was true?”
― Tennessee Williams, quote from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
“Big Daddy: What makes you so restless, have you got ants in your britches?
Brick: Yes, sir...
Big Daddy: Why?
Brick: - Something - Hasn't - Happened...
Big Daddy: Yeah? What is that?
Brick [sadly]: - the click...
Big Daddy: Did you say the click?
Brick: Yes, click.
Big Daddy: What click?
Brick: A click that I get in my head that makes me peaceful
Big Daddy: I sure in hell don't know what you're talking about, but it disturbs me.
Brick: It's just a mechanical thing.
Big Daddy: What is a mechanical thing?
Brick: This click that I get in my head that makes me peaceful. I got to drink till I get it.”
― Tennessee Williams, quote from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
“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...”
― Tennessee Williams, quote from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
“We mustn't scream at each other, the walls in this house have ears...”
― Tennessee Williams, quote from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
“Big Daddy: Ignorance - of mortality - is a comfort.”
― Tennessee Williams, quote from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
“I know! WHY! – Am I so catty? – Cause I’m consumed with envy an’ eaten up with longing? –”
― Tennessee Williams, quote from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Tennessee Williams
Born place: in Columbus, Mississippi, The United States
Born date March 26, 1911
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“life doesn’t often spell things out for you or give you what you want exactly when you want it, otherwise it wouldn’t be called life, it would be called vending machine. It’s hard to say exactly when it will happen, and it’s true that whatever you’re after may not drop down the moment you spend all your quarters, but someday soon a train is coming. In fact, it may already be on the way. You just don’t know it yet.”
― Lauren Graham, quote from Talking as Fast as I Can: From Gilmore Girls to Gilmore Girls, and Everything in Between
“Lo que dicen los libros es verdad.”
― Alejo Carpentier, quote from The Lost Steps
“It does not say, 'Blessed are those who are persecuted because they are objectionable.' It does not say, 'Blessed are those who are having a hard time in their Christian life because they are being difficult.' It does not say, 'Blessed are those who are being persecuted as Christians because they are seriously lacking in wisdom and are really foolish and unwise in what they regard as being their testimony.”
― D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, quote from Studies in the Sermon on the Mount
“All possession is based on consciousness. All gain is the result of an accumulative consciousness. All loss is the result of a scattering consciousness.”
― Charles F. Haanel, quote from The Master Key System
“With the gun which was too big for him, the breech-loader which did not even belong to him but to Major de Spain and which he had fired only once, at a stump on the first day to learn the recoil and how to reload it with the paper shells, he stood against a big gum tree beside a little bayou whose black still water crept without motion out of a cane-brake, across a small clearing and into the cane again, where, invisible, a bird, the big woodpecker called Lord-to-God by negroes, clattered at a dead trunk. It was a stand like any other stand, dissimilar only in incidentals to the one where he had stood each morning for two weeks; a territory new to him yet no less familiar than that other one which after two weeks he had come to believe he knew a little--the same solitude, the same loneliness through which frail and timorous man had merely passed without altering it, leaving no mark nor scar, which looked exactly as it must have looked when the first ancestor of Sam fathers' Chickasaw predecessors crept into it and looked about him, club or stone axe or bone arrow drawn and ready, different only because, squatting at the edge of the kitchen, he had smelled the dogs huddled and cringing beneath it and saw the raked ear and side of the bitch that, as Sam had said, had to be brave once in order to keep on calling herself a dog, and saw yesterday in the earth beside the gutted log, the print of the living foot. He heard no dogs at all. He never did certainly hear them. He only heard the drumming of the woodpecker stop short off, and knew that the bear was looking at him. he did not move, holding the useless gun which he knew now he would never fire at it, now or ever, tasting in his saliva that taint of brass which he had smelled in the huddled dogs when he peered under the kitchen.”
― William Faulkner, quote from Go Down, Moses
The Lost Garden
Hard as It Gets
Ramona
Against All Odds
Dark Tide
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