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I don't want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic. I try to give that to people. I do misrepresent things. I don't tell truths. I tell what ought to be truth.

— Tennessee Williams

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Spirituality

More quotes by Tennessee Williams

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

I think that moral earnestness is a good thing for any times, but particularly for these times.

Program notes for a Pasadena Playhouse production of Stairs to the Roof (1947)

We're all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life!

Orpheus Descending (1957)

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

The Glass Menagerie (1944)

All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent.

The Night of the Iguana (1963)

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Reason is Life's sole arbiter, the magic Laby'rinth's single clue:
Worlds lie above, beyond its ken; what crosses it can ne'er be true.

Richard Francis Burton The Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî (1870)

In imitating the exemplary acts of a god or of a mythic hero, or simply by recounting their adventures, the man of an archaic society detaches himself from profane time and magically re-enters the Great Time, the sacred time.

Mircea Eliade Myths, Dreams and Mysteries (1967)

Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.

Thomas Jefferson

The superior man loves his soul; the inferior man loves his property.

Confucius

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Tennessee Williams (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.