Quotes from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

“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

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Popular quotes

“But whatever dismal appearance of things there may be in the world, we need not fear the ruin of the church by the most bloody oppositions. Former experiences will give security against future events. It is built on the rock, and those gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”
― John Owen, quote from The Glory of Christ

“He gently kissed that scar and felt something changing inside him - just a flutter of change, there and gone, but leaving its mark.”
― Anne Bishop, quote from Marked in Flesh

“What is our life: (Pause.) it’s looking forward or it’s looking back. And that’s our life. That’s it. Where is the moment?”
― David Mamet, quote from Glengarry Glen Ross

“...it's better to wake up amid the pangs of desire than amid those of remorse.”
― Amin Maalouf, quote from Balthasar's Odyssey

“Marginalia

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
who wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird singing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love.”
― Billy Collins, quote from Picnic, Lightning

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