Collected Stories Quotes

“Anything might have been anything else and had as much meaning to it.”
― Tennessee Williams, Collected Stories

“These are the intensities that one cannot live with, that he has to outgrow if he wants to survive. But who can help grieving for them? If the blood vessels could hold them, how much better to keep those early loves with us?”
― Tennessee Williams, Collected Stories

“For there was a conspiracy of dullness in the world, a universal plan to shut out the resurgences of spirit which might interfere with clockwork. Better to keep your elevation unseen until it is higher than strangers' hands can reach to pull you down to their level.”
― Tennessee Williams, Collected Stories

“I saw that it was all over, put away in a box like a doll no longer cared for, the magical intimacy of our childhood together”
― Tennessee Williams, Collected Stories

“And it was about then, about that time, that I began to find life unsatisfactory as an explanation of itself and was forced to adopt the method of the artist of not explaining but putting the blocks together in some other way that seems more significant to him. Which is a rather fancy way of saying I started writing.”
― Tennessee Williams, Collected Stories

“he would die early, since nothing so fair could decline by common degrees in a faded season.”
― Tennessee Williams, Collected Stories

“It was useless trying to explain to Cecila that poetry wasn't a commodity, that it could never be bought or sold, that it was, in fact, unteansferrable, remaining forever a part of the one who wrote it.”
― Tennessee Williams, Collected Stories

“When things don't change, their sameness becomes an accretion.”
― Tennessee Williams, Collected Stories

“I once caught him in the act of revising a short story that had just been published. “Why,” I asked, “rewrite what’s already in print?” He looked at me, vaguely; then said, “Well, obviously it’s not finished.”
― Tennessee Williams, Collected Stories