Great Throughts Treasury

"Most of the confidence which I appear to feel, especially when influenced by noon wine, is only a pretense."

"Morning can always be counted on to bring us back to a more realistic level."

"Mendacity is a system that we live in, declares Brick. Liquor is one way out an' death's the other."

"Men don’t want anything they get too easy. But on the other hand, men lose interest quickly."

"Nothing's more determined than a cat on a hot tin roof."

"Nothing human disgusts me unless it's unkind."

"Oh, Jacques, we're used to each other, we're a pair of captive hawks caught in the same cage, and so we've grown used to each other. That's what passes for love at this dim, shadowy end of the Camino Real."

"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."

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

"Q. Do you have any positive message, in your opinion? A. Indeed I do think that I do. Q. Such as what? A. The crying, almost screaming, need of a great worldwide human effort to know ourselves and each other a great deal better, we'll enough to concede that no man has a monopoly on right or virtue any more than any man has a corner on duplicity and evil and so forth. If people, and races and nations, would start with that self manifests truth, then I think that the world could sidestep the sort of corruption which I have involuntarily chosen as the basic, allegorical theme of my plays as a whole."

"Revolution only needs good dreamers who remember their dreams."

"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!"

"Only animals have to satisfy instincts! Surely your aims are somewhat higher than theirs! Than monkeys! Pigs!"

"Q. Why don't you write about nice people? Haven't you ever known any nice people in your life? A .My theory about nice people is so simple that I am embarrassed to say it.Q. Please say it. A. We'll, I've never met one that I couldn't love if I completely knew him and understood him, and in my work I have at least tried to arrive at knowledge and understanding. 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. Why don't we meet these people and get to know them as I try to meet and know people in my plays?"

"Say a prayer for the wild at heart kept in cages."

"Security is a kind of death."

"Silence about a thing just magnifies it."

"Some mystery should be left in the revelation of character in a play, just as a great deal of mystery is always left in the revelation of character in life, even in one's own character to himself."

"Snatching the eternal out of the desperately fleeting is the great magic trick of human existence."

"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."

"Success and failure are equally disastrous."

"Sorrow makes for sincerity, I think."

"Sometimes - there's God - so quickly!"

"Success is blocked by concentrating on it and planning for it... Success is shy - it won't come out while you're watching."

"The color, the grace and levitation, the structural pattern in motion, the quick interplay of live beings, suspended like fitful lightning in a cloud, these things are the play, not words on paper, nor thoughts and ideas of an author, those shabby things snatched off basement counters at Gimbel's."

"Talk of the devil, and his horns appear"

"That Europe's nothin' on earth but a great big auction, that's all it is."

"Talent? What is talent but the ability to get away with something?"

"The decline of the Western world began with the invention of the wheel."

"The cities swept about me like dead leaves, leaves that we're brightly colored but torn away from the branches. I would have stopped, but I was pursued by something. It always came upon me unawares, taking me altogether by surprise. Perhaps it was a familiar bit of music. Perhaps it was only a piece of transparent glass."

"The future becomes the present, the present the past, and the past turns into everlasting regret if you don't plan for it."

"The helpless can't help the helpless."

"The flowers in the mountains have broken through the rocks."

"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."

"The human animal is a beast that dies but the fact that he’s dying don’t give him pity for others, no sir."

"The human heart would never pass the drunk test... If you took the human heart out of the human body and put a pair of legs on it and told it to walk a straight line, it couldn't do it."

"The most dangerous word in any human tongue is the word for brother. It's inflammatory."

"The rest of my days I'm going to spend on the sea. And when I die, I'm going to die on the sea. You know what I shall die of? I shall die of eating an unwashed grape. One day out on the ocean I will diewith my hand in the hand of some nice looking ships doctor, a very young one with a small blond moustache and a big silver watch. 'Poor lady,' they'll say, 'The quinine did her no good. That unwashed grape has transported her soul to heaven."

"The process by which the idea for a play comes to me has always been something I really couldn't pinpoint. A play just seems to materialize; like an apparition, it gets clearer and clearer and clearer. It's very vague at first, as in the case of Streetcar, which came after Menagerie. I simply had the vision of a woman in her late youth. She was sitting in a chair all alone by a window with the moonlight streaming in on her desolate face, and she’d been stood up by the man she planned to marry."

"The scene is memory and is therefore nonrealistic. Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart."

"The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that s also a hypocrite!"

"The Venus flytrap, a devouring organism, aptly named for the goddess of love."

"The theatre is a place where one has time for the problems of people to whom one would show the door if they came to one's office for a job."

"There ain't nothin' more powerful than the odor of mendacity...You can smell it. It smells like death."

"There are no 'good' or 'bad' people. Some are a little better or a little worse, but all are activated more by misunderstanding than malice. A blindness to what is going on in each other's hearts... nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own egos. That is the way we all see ...each other in life. Vanity, fear, desire, competition- ll such distortions within our own egos-- condition our vision of those in relation to us. Add to those distortions to our own egos the corresponding distortions in the egos of others, and you see how cloudy the glass must become through which we look at each other. That's how it is in all living relationships except when there is that rare case of two people who love intensely enough to burn through all those layer of opacity and see each other's naked hearts. Such cases seem purely theoretical to me..."

"The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks."

"The strongest influences in my life and my work are always whomever I love. Whomever I love and am with most of the time, or whomever I remember most vividly. I think that s true of everyone, don t you?"

"Then what is good? The obsessive interest in human affairs, plus a certain amount of compassion and moral conviction, that first made the experience of living something that must be translated into pigment or music or bodily movement or poetry or prose or anything that's dynamic and expressive that’s what's good for you if you're at all serious in your aims. William Saroyan wrote a great play on this theme, that purity of heart is the one success worth having. 'In the time of your life live.' That time is short and it doesn't return again. It is slipping away while I write this and while you read it, the monosyllable of the clock is Loss, loss, loss, unless you devote your heart to its opposition."

"There comes a time when you look into the mirror and you realize that what you see is all that you will ever be. And then you accept it. Or you kill yourself. Or you stop looking in mirrors."

"There is a time for departure, even when there is no certain place to go."