A Streetcar Named Desire Quotes

What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it's curved like a road through mountains.

I don't want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don't tell the truth, I tell what ought to be the truth. And it that's sinful, then let me be damned for it!

I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.

Don't you just love those long rainy afternoons in New Orleans when an hour isn't just an hour - but a little piece of eternity dropped into your hands - and who knows what to do with it?

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.

I don't want realism. I want magic!

Deliberate cruelty is unforgivable. --Blanche Dubois

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!

Oh, you can't describe someone you're in love with!

Show me a person who hasn´t known any sorrow and I´ll show you a superficial.

They told me to take a streetcar named Desire and then transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at - Elysian Fields!

And funerals are pretty compared to deaths.

I can't stand a naked light bulb, any more than I can a rude remark or a vulgar action.

Well, honey, a shot never does a coke any harm!

Never inside, I didn't lie in my heart...

We've had this date with each other from the beginning.

He was a boy, just a boy, when I was a very young girl. When I was sixteen, I made the discovery - love. All at once and much, much too completely. It was like you suddenly turned a blinding on something that had always been half in shadow, that's how it struck the world for me. But I was unlucky. Deluded.

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 die--with my hand in the hand of some nice looking ship's 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.

Stanley: Delicate piece she is. Stella: She is. She was. You didn't know Blanche as a girl. Nobody, nobody, was tender and trusting as she was. But people like you abused her, and forced her to change.

I know I fib a good deal. After all, a woman's charm is fifty per cent illusion, but when a thing is important I tell the truth. - Blanche Scene II

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.

When I was sixteen, I made the discovery -- love. All at once and much, much too completely. It was like you suddenly turned a blinding light on something that had always been half in shadow, that's how it struck the world for me.

Stella: And when he comes back I cry on his lap like a baby.. [she smiles to herself] Blanche: I guess that is what is meant by being in love..

-You're simple, straightforward and honest, a little bit on the primitive side, I should think. To interest you a woman would have to... -To lay her cards out on the table.

Sometimes—there's God—so quickly!

I want to rest. I want to breathe quietly again.

...love, all at once and much, much too completely. It's like you suddenly turn a blinding light on something that had always been half a shadow...

[Her delicate beauty must avoid a strong light. There is something about her uncertain manner, as well as her white clothes, that suggests a moth.]

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.

Blanche: No, I have the misfortune of being an English instructor. I attempt to instill a bunch of bobby-soxers and drugstore Romeos with a reverence for Hawthorne and Whitman and Poe!

And then the searchlight which had been turned on the world was turned off again and never for one moment since has there been any light that's stronger than this-kitchen-candle...

I'll tell you what I want. Magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misinterpret things to them. I don't tell the truth. I tell what ought to be truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it! - Don't turn the light on!

...most writers, and most other artists, too, are primarily motivated in their desperate vocation by a desire to find and to separate truth from the complex of lies and evasions they live in, and I think that this impulse is what makes their work not so much a profession as a vocation, a true calling.

A fire smokes the most when you start pouring water on it.

I never met a woman that didn’t know if she was good-looking or not without being told, and some of them give themselves credit for more than they’ve got.

And funerals are pretty compared to deaths. Funerals are quiet, but deaths—not always. Sometimes their breathing is hoarse, sometimes it rattles, sometimes they cry out to you, Don’t let me go! Even the old sometimes say, Don’t let me go! As if you were able to stop them! Funerals are quiet with pretty flowers. And oh, what gorgeous boxes they pack them away in!

I am not a Polack. People from Poland are Poles, not Polacks. But what I am is one-hundred-per-cent American, born and raised in the greatest country on earth and proud as hell of it, so don’t ever call me a Polack.

He acts like an animal, has an animal's habits! Eats like one, moves like one, talks like one! There's even something -sub-human -something not quite to the stage of humanity yet! Yes, something - ape-like about him, like one of those pictures I've seen in - anthropological studies! Thousands and thousands of years have passed him right by, and there he is - Stanley Kowalski - survivor of the Stone Age! Bearing the raw meat home from the kill in the jungle! And you - you here - waiting for him! Maybe he'll strike you or maybe grunt and kiss you! That is, if kisses have been discovered yet! Night falls and the other apes gather! There in the front of the cave, all grunting like him, and swilling and gnawing and hulking! His poker night! - you call it - this party of apes! Somebody growls - some creature snatches at something - the fight is on! God! Maybe we are a long way from beng made in God's image, but Stella - my sister - there has been some progress since then! Such things as art - as poetry and music - such kinds of new light have come into the world since then! In some kinds of people some tendered feelings have had some little beginning! That we have got to make grow! And cling to, and hold as our flag! In this dark march towards what-ever it is we're approaching . . . Don't - don't hang back with the brutes!

The world is a funny paper read backwards. And that was it isn't so funny.

Life has got to go on. No matter what happens, you've got to keep on going.

It’s cruelty that gets to me. Still, it’s important to read about cruelty. “Why is it important?” Because when you read about it, it’s easier to recognize. That was always the hardest thing in the refugee camps—to hear the stories of the people who had been raped or mutilated or forced to watch a parent or a sister or a child be raped or killed. It’s very hard to come face-to-face with such cruelty. But people can be cruel in lots of ways, some very subtle. I think that’s why we all need to read about it. I think that’s one of the amazing things about Tennessee Williams’s plays. He was so attuned to cruelty—the way Stanley treats Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire. It starts with asides and looks and put-downs. There are so many great examples from Shakespeare—when Goneril torments King Lear or the way Iago speaks to Othello. And what I love about Dickens is the way he presents all types of cruelty. You need to learn to recognize these things right from the start. Evil almost always starts with small cruelties.

I don't want realism, I want magic! Yes, yes, magic!

And in the spring, it's touching to notice them making their first discovery of love! As if nobody had ever known it before!

I like you to be exactly the way you are, because in all my - experience - I have never known anyone like you.

Sorrow makes for sincerity, I think... The little there is belongs to people who have experienced some sorrow.

Deliberate cruelty is not forgivable. It is the one unforgivable thing in my opinion and it is the one thing of which I have never, never been guilty.

Animal joy in his being is implicit in all his movements and attitudes. Since earliest manhood the center of his life has been pleasure with women, the giving and taking of it, not with weak indulgence, dependently, but with the power and pride of a richly feathered male bird among hens. […] He sizes women up with a glance, with sexual classifications, crude images flashing into his mind and determining the way he smiles at them.

I never was hard or sell-sufficient enough. When people are soft--soft people have got to shimmer and glow--they've got to put on soft colors, the colors of butterfly wings, and put a-- paper lantern over the light.... It isn't enough to be soft. You've got to be soft and attractive. And I--I'm fading now! I don't know how much longer I can turn the trick.

The world is a funny paper read backwards. And that way it isn't so funny.

The Jefferson is such a dignified hotel / There is no such thing.

I cannot imagine any witch of a woman casting a spell over you.

Oh, no se puede describir al que se ama

Whoever you are—I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.

Her delicate beauty must avoid a strong light.

And then the searchlight which had been turned on the world was turned off again, and never for one moment since has there been any light that's stronger than this-kitchen-candle...

The low-tone clarinet moans. The door upstairs opens again. Stella slips down the rickety stairs in her robe. Her eyes are glistening with tears and her hair loose about her throat and shoulders. They stare at each other. Then they come together with low, animal moans. He falls to his knees on the steps and presses his face to her belly, curving a little with maternity. Her eyes go blind with tenderness as she catches his head and raises him level with her. He snatches the screen door open and lifts her off her feet and bears her into the dark flat.

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, and the monosyllable of the clock is Loss, Loss, Loss, unless you devote your heart to its opposition.

BLANCHE: You see I still have that awful vanity about my looks even now that my looks are slipping!

Whoever you are – I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.

But, honey, you know as well as I do that a single girl, a girl alone in the world, has got to keep a firm hold on her emotions or she'll be lost!

New Orleans is a cosmopolitan city where there is a relatively warm and easy intermingling of races in the old part of town.

They told me to take a street-car named Desire, and then transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at—Elysian Fields!

Oh, you can't describe someone you're in love with! Here is a picture of him!

I'm not going to be hypocritical, I'm going to be honestly critical

Life has got to go on. No matter what happens, you’ve got to keep going.

A single girl, a girl alone in the world, has got to keep a firm hold on her emotions or she’ll be lost!

I think you have a great capacity for devotion,

Y'know how indifferent I am to money. I think of money in terms of what it does for you.

Oh, I hope candles are going to glow in his life

El objetivo de su vida, desde su adolescencia, es el placer con las mujeres, que da y recibe, no con indulgente ligereza sino con el orgulloso poder de un gallo de buen plumaje en un corral de gallinas. De esta satisfecha plenitud derivan todos los cardes secundarios de su vida: amistad con los hombres, humor rudo y directo, amor a la buena mesa y a la buena bebida, al juego, a su coche, a su radio, a todo cuanto posee y lleva por ello la impronta orgulloso del sembrador. Valora las mujeres al primer vistazo, las clasifica sexualmente y les dedica la sonrisa justa.

And so it was I entered the broken world To trace the visionary company of hue, its voice An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled) But not for long to hold each desperate choice. “The Broken Tower” by Hart Crane

I started showing them some of Tommy’s greatest acting hits. “Oh my God,” one of them said, laughing. “This is so terrible.” Another one, looking back so as not to be overheard by anyone, said, “Seriously, Greg. Does he think this is serious? This is real?” “Completely,” I said. “Tommy thinks this is the next Streetcar Named Desire.” “What’s he planning to do with this movie?” “Submit it to the Academy Awards.” Everyone laughed, but I wasn’t kidding. That was Tommy’s stated goal.

Tonight, no one will rage and cry: "My Kingdom for a horse!" No ghost will come to haunt the battlements of a castle in the kingdom of Denmark where, apparently something is rotten. Nor will anyone wring her hands and murmur: "Leave, I do not despise you." Three still young women will not retreat to a dacha whispering the name of Moscow, their beloved, their lost hope. No sister will await the return of her brother to avenge the death of their father, no son will be forced to avenge an affront to his father, no mother will kill her three children to take revenge on their father. And no husband will see his doll-like wife leave him out of contempt. No one will turn into a rhinoceros. Maids will not plot to assassinate their mistress, after denouncing her lover and having him jailed. No one will fret about "the rain in Spain!" No one will emerge from a garbage pail to tell an absurd story. Italian families will not leave for the seashore. No soldier will return from World War II and bang on his father's bedroom dor protesting the presence of a new wife in his mother's bed. No evanescent blode will drown. No Spanish nobleman will seduce a thousand and three women, nor will an entire family of Spanish women writhe beneath the heel of the fierce Bernarda Alba. You won't see a brute of a man rip his sweat-drenched T-shirt, shouting: "Stella! Stella!" and his sister-in-law will not be doomed the minute she steps off the streetcar named Desire. Nor will you see a stepmother pine away for her new husband's youngest son. The plague will not descend upon the city of Thebes, and the Trojan War will not take place. No king will be betrayed by his ungrateful daughters. There will be no duels, no poisonings, no wracking coughs. No one will die, or, if someone must die, it will become a comic scene. No, there will be none of the usual theatrics. What you will see tonight is a very simple woman, a woman who will simply talk...

I was not aware of how much vital energy had gone into this struggle until the struggle was removed. I was out on a level plateau with my arms still thrashing and my lungs sill grabbing at air that no longer resisted. This was security at last.

Odets, differently, was avowedly embarked on a campaign to poeticize American playwriting, and worked to create a swinging lyricism that indeed was quirky and easily identifiable as his own and no one else’s. It could be memorable a lot of the time and created some instant imitators. For myself, it soon lost its impact possibly because of its very success in sounding odd, original, even peculiar. “I’m going out to get an eight-cylinder sandwich” can strike gold the first time it is heard but possibly because of its self-consciousness it somehow doesn’t bear repeating.

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.

EB: 'Ll showed me a long verse-letter, very obscene, he’d received from Dylan T[Thomas] before D’s last trip here [New York]—very clever, but it really can’t be published for a long, long time, he’s decided. About people D. met in the U.S. etc.—one small sample: A Streetcar Named Desire is referred to as 'A truck called F———.' RL: 'Psycho-therapy is rather amazing—something like stirring up the bottom of an aquarium—chunks of the past coming up at unfamiliar angles, distinct and then indistinct.' RL: 'I have just finished the Yeats Letters—900 & something pages—although some I’d read before. He is so Olympian always, so calm, so really unrevealing, and yet I was fascinated.' RL: 'Probably you forget, and anyway all that is mercifully changed and all has come right since you found Lota. But at the time everything, I guess (I don’t want to overdramatize) our relations seemed to have reached a new place. I assumed that would be just a matter of time before I proposed and I half believed that you would accept. Yet I wanted it all to have the right build-up. Well, I didn’t say anything then.' EB: 'so I suppose I am just a born worrier, and that when the personal worries of adolescence and the years after it have more or less disappeared I promptly have to start worrying about the decline of nations . . . But I really can’t bear much of American life these days—surely no country has ever been so filthy rich and so hideously uncomfortable at the same time.

[Tennessee] William's writing has the effect that all great writing has on an actor. It steadies you. It emboldens you You ride an elevator to the top floor of a building, you jump off the penthouse balcony, and you fly. Just put one foot in front of the other, one line after the other, one moment after the other, and you are walking on air. It was the creative experience of a lifetime. (playing Stanley in Streetcar Named Desire)

STELLA: But there are things that happen between a man and a woman in the dark—that sort of make everything else seem—unimportant. {Pause.} BLANCHE: What you are talking about is brutal desire—just—Desire!—the name of that rattle-trap street-car that bangs through the Quarter, up one old narrow street and down another... STELLA: Haven't you ever ridden on that street-car? BLANCHE: It brought me here.—Where I'm not wanted and where I'm ashamed to be...

Stanley Kowalski: I don't go in for that stuff. Blanche DuBois: What stuff? Stanley Kowalski: Compliments to women about their looks. I never met a woman yet that didn't know if she was good-looking or not without being told, and some of them give themselves credit for more than they've got. I once went out with a woman who told me, " I'm the glamorous type," she says, "I am the glamorous type!" I say, "So What?" Blanche DuBois: And what did she say then? Stanley Kowalski: She didn't say nothing. That shut her up like a clam.

أنا لا أريد الواقع , سأقول لك ما أريد. السحر! نعم السحر ! أحاول تقديم ذلك إلى الناس . إني أشوه الأمور لهم . إني لا أقول الحقيقة . إني أقول ما يجب أن يكون الحقيقة . الأسى يعزز الإخلاص .. إنه يبرزه لدى الناس بالتأكيد .. أرني شخصاً لم يعرف الأسى , أريك أنه سطحي ربما كنا بعيدين جداً عن اتخاذنا صورة الرب , ولكن لقد حصل بعض التقدم منذ ذلك الوقت! أمور مثل الفنون , مثل الشعر والموسيقى .. لقد أشرقت على العالم أنواع من النور الجديد منذ ذلك الوقت! لقد بدأت تظهر لدى بعض فئات الناس مشاعر أرق ! ويجب علينا أن ننميها ونتمسك بها ونجعلها شعاراً لنا في هذا المسير المظلم نحو أي شيء نقترب منه ... إن فردوس البائس هو بعض من الإطمئنان

When I was sixteen, I made the discovery – love. All at once and much, much too completely. It was like you suddenly turned a blinding light on something that had always been half in shadow, that’s how it struck the world for me. But I was unlucky. Deluded. There was something different about the boy, a nervousness, a softness and tenderness which wasn’t like a man’s, although he wasn’t the least bit effeminate-looking – still – that thing was there … He came to me for help. I didn’t know that. I didn’t find out anything till after our marriage when we’d run away and come back and all I knew was I’d failed him in some mysterious way and wasn’t able to give the help he needed but couldn’t speak of! He was in the quicksands and clutching at me – but I wasn’t holding him out, I was slipping in with him! I didn’t know that. I didn’t know anything except I loved him unendurably but without being able to help him or help myself. Then I found out. In

What’s your name? Blanche DuBois?’ he said to me as we were waiting. ‘Sorry, you said it in the infirmary but you seem like you could be a Blanche.’ I just stared. ‘Blanche DuBois,’ he said again. I didn’t understand. ‘I’ve always relied on the kindness of strangers,’ he said. I still didn’t get it. ‘That’s what Blanche DuBois says. Sorry, it’s a Tennessee Williams character. You remind me of her.’ ‘It’s true, you’re being very kind, yes,’ I said and I thought that maybe it had been his kindness and not his cologne that had penetrated the shield I’d put up around myself. ‘You’re very kind,’ I said again. ‘I’m not talking about me, I’m talking about you,’ he said. ‘Every time I read or see A Streetcar Named Desire in the theatre, when Blanche says those lines, I think that a person who has to rely on the kindness of strangers must be all alone in the world. Even if they’re surrounded by people. If someone has to rely on the kindness of strangers it’s because the people around them aren’t people they can count on.’ His words described me so perfectly that I shuddered.

February 15: Marilyn accompanies Kazan and Miller to Santa Barbara for a preview of A Streetcar Named Desire, directed by Kazan. Marilyn moves out of Natasha Lytess’s apartment and into another apartment with Shelley Winters.

I wanted to know what enchanted her about A Streetcar Named Desire. And I get it. I truly do. What Tennessee Williams was trying to say here. The burning desire to call some place—any place—home. I’m no literary expert, but what I liked about this is the notion that we all at times ride on a road so dark, sometimes we don’t even realize when our eyes are closed. Not until a fissure of light cracks through.

Lost in her litany of thoughts, Emma was only vaguely aware of the alarm sounding. ‘Can you turn that fucking thing off?’ said Guy’s back. He emphasized the ‘fucking’, like a child self-consciously trying out swearing for the first time. Funny how his back seemed to have taken on a personality all of its own now Emma saw it so often. It was intractable, solid, unyielding – she imagined it to be like Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire, all brooding muscle and tense resistance. Unlike Guy himself whose presence settled around the house like fine mist, everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

BLANCHE:...Don't you just love these long rainy afternoons in New Orleans when an hour isn't just an hour—but a little piece of eternity dropped into your hands—and who knows what to do with it?