Mendacity

Quote

Speaker

This loud “HAH!” is accompanied by a violent action such as slamming a drawer shut.

Williams

Skipper and I made love, if love you could call it, because it made both of us feel a little bit closer to you.

Maggie

I – I think it was – noble!

Maggie

In this way, I destroyed him, by telling him truth that he and his world which he was born and raised in, yours and his world, had told him could not be told.

Maggie

You’re passin’ the buck to things like time and disgust with “mendacity”

Big Daddy

In his utterance of this word, we gauge the wide and profound reach of the conventional mores he got from the world that crowned him with early laurel.

Williams

This disgust with mendacity is disgust with yourself. You dug the grave of your friend and kicked him in it!

Big Daddy

Big Daddy appears first, a tall man with a fierce, anxious look, moving carefully not to betray his weakness, even, or especially, to himself.

Williams

All the goddam lies and liars that I have had to put up with, and all the goddam hypocrisy.

Big Daddy

I’ll strip her naked and smother her in minks and choke her with diamonds.

Big Daddy

The human animal is a selfish beast.

Big Daddy

Mae throws back her head and rolls her eyes heavenward and extends her arms as if invoking God’s pity for this unjust martyrdom. This monument, is a very complete and compact shrine to virtually all the comforts and illusions behind which we hide from such things as the characters in the play are faced with.

Williams

A speech of this kind would be antipathetic from almost anybody but Margaret; she makes it oddly funny, because her eyes constantly twinkle and her voice shakes with laughter which is basically indulgent.

Williams

Mendacity is a system that we live in.

Brick

And so tonight we’re going to make the lie true.

Maggie

The set should be far less realistic than I have so far implied. I think the walls below the ceiling should dissolve mysteriously into air; the set should be roofed by the sky; stars and moon suggested by traces of milky pallor, as if they were observed through a telescope lens out of focus.

Williams

For the set is the background for a play that deals with human extremities of emotion, and it needs that softness behind it.

Williams

Who are you?

Maggie (to herself)

I let many chances slip by because of scruples about it, scruples, convention.

Big Daddy

The human machine is not no different from the animal machine.

Big Daddy