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Quotes of the Day for 26 March 2005 - Tennessee Williams

Thomas Lanier Williams was born at Columbus, Mississippi on this day in 1911. His father was a sometimes-violent travelling salesman which left him at home with a puritanical and over-protective mother. On his second try at college he joined the drama program at the University of Iowa and started writing plays. In 1939 he moved to New Orleans and changed his name to Tennessee, for which he offered several different reasons. In 1944 his agent got him six months of work writing for MGM in Hollywood, a script that didn't become part of a movie became a Broadway hit as "The Glass Menagerie", for which he won the New York Drama Critics' Circle award - the first of three. He followed this with "A Streetcar Named Desire" which brought him the first of his two Pulitzers.

High station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace.

There is a time for departure even when there's no certain place to go.

If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it.

I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person. But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people really.

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

It haunts me, the passage of time. I think time is a merciless thing. I think life is a process of burning oneself out and time is the fire that burns you. But I think the spirit of man is a good adversary.
     - All from Tennessee Williams, 1911 - 1983

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