1. “I’m not young and vulnerable any more.”
Blanche speaking to Stanley, Scene 2
2. “He acts like an animal, has an animal’s habits! Eats like one, moves like one, talks like one!”
Blanche speaking about Stanley, Scene 4.
3. “In some kinds of people some tenderer feelings have had some little beginning! That we have to make grow! And cling to, and hold as our flag!”
Blanche speaking to Stella, Scene 4
4. “And men don’t want anything they get too easy. But on the other hand, men lose interest quickly.”
Blanche speaking to Stella, Scene 5
5. “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.”
Blanche speaking about the effect on her of her husband’s suicide, Scene 6
6. “I don’t want realism. I want magic!”
Blanche speaking to Mitch, Scene 9
7. “Never inside, I didn’t lie in my heart.”
Blanche speaking to Mitch, Scene 9
8. “You’re not clean enough to bring in the house with my mother.”
Mitch speaking to Blanche, Scene 9
9. “Whoever you are—I have always depended on the kindness of strangers."
Blanche speaking to the Doctor, Scene 11
10. “This ‘Blue Piano’ expresses the spirit of the life which goes on here.” (Scene One)
11. “Blanche…is incongruous to this setting. She is daintily dressed in a white suit with a fluffy bodice, necklace and earrings of pearl, white gloves and hat, looking as if she were arriving at a summer tea or cocktail party in the garden district” (scene one).
12. Stanley: “In the state of Louisiana we have the Napoleonic code according to which what belongs to the wife belongs to the husband and vice versa” (scene two)
13. “The kitchen now suggests that sort of lurid nocturnal brilliance, the raw colors of childhood’s spectrum… the poker players—Stanley, Steve, Mitch and Pablo—wear colored shirts, solid blues, a purple, a red-and-white check, a light green, and they are men at the peak of their physical manhood, as coarse and direct and powerful as the primary colors” (scene three).
14. Blanche: “show me a person who hasn’t known any sorrow and I’ll show you a superficial—Listen to me! My tongue is a little—thick! … I’m not accustomed to having more than one drink. Two is the limit—and three! Tonight I had three” (scene three).
15. Stella: “I said I am not in anything that I have a desire to get out of… People have got to tolerate each other’s habits I guess” (scene four).
16. Blanche: “I never was hard or self-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” (scene five).
17. Blanche: “Because of my hard knocks my vanity’s been given. What I mean is—he thinks I’m sort of—prim and proper, you know! [she laughs out sharply] I want to deceive him enough to make him—want me . . .” (scene five).
18. Blanche: “Young man! Young, young, young man! Has anyone ever told you that you look like a young Prince out of the Arabian Nights?… Well, you do, honey lamb! Come here. I want to kiss you, just once, softly and sweetly on your mouth!” (scene five).
19. Blanche: “[singing]: ‘It’s a Barnum and Bailey world, Just as phony as it can be-- but it wouldn’t be make-believe If you believed in me!” (scene seven).”
20. Stanley: “Tiger—tiger! Drop the bottle top! Drop it! We’ve had this date with each other from the beginning!” [She moans. The bottle top falls. She sinks to her knees. He picks up her inert figure and carries her to the bed. The hot trumpet and drums from the Four Deuces sound loudly]
21. They told me to take a street-car named Desire, and transfer to one called Cemeteries, and ride six blocks and get off at—Elysian Fields!
22. There are thousands of papers, stretching back over hundreds of years, affecting Belle Reve as, piece by piece, our improvident grandfathers and father and uncles and brothers exchanged the land for their epic fornications—to put it plainly! . . . The four-letter
23. word deprived us of our plantation, till finally all thatwas left—and Stella can verify that!—was the house itself and about twenty acres of ground, including a graveyard, to which now all but Stella and I have retreated.
24. Oh, I guess he’s just not the type that goes for jasmine perfume, but maybe he’s what we need to mix with our blood now that we’ve lost Belle Reve.
25. I am not a Polack. People from Poland are Poles, not Polacks. But what I am is a one hundred percent American, born and raised in the greatest country on earth and proud as hell of it, so don’t ever call me aPolack.