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Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.

— Tennessee Williams The Glass Menagerie (1944)

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Truth

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)

All Tennessee Williams quotes →

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You have to start with the truth. The truth is the only way that we can get anywhere. Because any decision-making that is based upon lies or ignorance can't lead to a good conclusion.

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False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.

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I believe in evil. It is the property of all those who are certain of truth. Despair and fanaticism are only differing manifestations of evil.

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Wars produce many stories of fiction, some of which are told until they are believed to be true.

Ulysses S. Grant Personal Memoirs of General U. S. Grant (1885)

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.