"Every time you come in yelling that God damn "Rise and Shine!" "Rise and Shine!" I say to myself, "How lucky dead people are!"

Tennessee Williams Literature See all quotes by Tennessee Williams →

React to this quote

More by Tennessee Williams

“I'll just imagine he had an operation. The horn was removed to make him feel less — freakish! Now he will feel more at home with the other horses, the ones that don't have horns…”

“I believe in the future of television! I wish to be ready to go up right along with it. Therefore I'm planning to get in on the ground floor. In fact I've already made the right connections and all that remains is for the industry itself to get under way! Full steam — Knowledge — Zzzzzp! Money — Zzzzzp! — Power!”

“Things have a way of turning out so badly.”

“The future is called "perhaps," which is the only possible thing to call the future. And the important thing is not to allow that to scare you.”

“You don't know things anywhere! You live in a dream; you manufacture illusions!”

“We saw the Encantadas, but on the Encantadas we saw something Melville hadn't written about.”

Resonant Thoughts

"I had a lot of problems with my name … my first name Declan is really not very well known outside of Ireland, MacManus is a name they could never spell ... if you think about the names of '76, '77 … I…"

— Elvis Costello

Music1954

#time

"I have felt it myself. The glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it's there in your hands, to release this energy that fuels the stars, to let it d…"

— Freeman Dyson

Science1923–2020

#power

"The waves round the horn will toss us to and fro, to and fro like a rubber duckie in the bathtub of an angry God."

— Arthur M. Jolly

Literature1969

#religion

"In its glorification of the spirit of order, the Church seemed to be giving its sanction to the type of bourgeois who was concerned to fulfill his duties scrupulously and content to remain within his …"

— Bernard Groethuysen

Philosophy1880–1946

#religion