Maggie, we're through with lies and liars in this house. Lock the door.
Tennessee WilliamsRead
Time rushes towards us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation.
Interpretation
Time brings both distractions and the inevitability of death.
Tennessee Williams uses this quote to convey the paradox of life, where time offers us myriad distractions and pleasures, symbolized as 'narcotics', while simultaneously reminding us of our mortality. It suggests an awareness that amidst life's fleeting joys, we are ultimately subject to the inexorable passage of time which leads to our inevitable end.
In practice
In a discussion about the fleeting nature of life at a philosophical seminar.
Maggie, we're through with lies and liars in this house. Lock the door.
Show me a person who hasn´t known any sorrow and I´ll show you a superficial.
Success and failure are equally disastrous.
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.
Life is partly what we make it, and partly what it is made by the friends we choose.
Somebody said once or wrote, once: 'We're all of us children in a vast kindergarten trying to spell God's name with the wrong alphabet blocks!
We have the power to choose, moment by moment, who and how we want to be in the world.
Fear the sins that you commit in secret, because the Witness of those sins is the Judge Himself!
The disruptive powers of excessive national fecundity may have played a greater part in bursting the bonds of convention than either the power of ideas or the errors of autocracy.
But this people has deliberately made itself stupid, for nearly a millennium: nowhere have the two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity, been abused more dissolutely.
Peril, loneliness, an uncertain future, are not oppressive evils, so long as the frame is healthy and the faculties are employed; so long, especially, as Liberty lends us her wings, and Hope guides us by her star.
There is nothing good or evil save in the will.
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