The Glass Menagerie Quotes

Quote 1: "long-delayed but always expected something that we live for." Part 1, Scene 1, pg. 5

Quote 2: "a long distance man who fell in love with long distances" Part 1, Scene 1, pg. 5

Quote 3: "Hello -- Goodbye!" Scene 1, pg. 5

Quote 4: "Mother, when you're disappointed, you get that awful suffering look on your face, like the picture of Jesus' mother in the museum." Part 1, Scene 2, pg. 15

Quote 5: "I've seen such pitiful cases in the South -- barely tolerated spinsters living upon the grudging patronage of sister's husband or brother's wife! -- stuck away in some little mousetrap of a room -- encouraged by one in-law to visit another -- little birdlike women without any nest -- eating the crust of humility all their life!" Part 1, Scene 2, pg. 16

Quote 6: "Blue Roses" Part 1, Scene 2, pg. 17

Quote 7: "Like some archetype of the universal unconscious, the image of the gentleman caller haunted [their] small apartment . . ." Part 2, Scene 3, pg. 19

Quote 8: "a Christian martyr." Part 2, Scene 3, pg. 20

Quote 9: "Every time you come in yelling that Goddamn 'Rise and Shine! Rise and Shine!' I say to myself, 'How lucky dead people are!' But I get up. I go! For sixty-five dollars a month I give up all that I dream of doing and being ever! And you say self -- self's all I ever think of. Why, listen, if self is what I though of, Mother, I'd be where he is -- GONE!" Part 2, Scene 3, pg. 23

Quote 10: "But the wonderfullest trick of all was the coffin trick. We nailed him into a coffin and he got out of the coffin without removing one nail. There is a trick that would come in handy for me -- get me out of this two-by-four situation." Part 2, Scene 4, pg. 27

Quote 11: "Rise and Shine! Rise and shine!" Part 2, Scene 4, pg. 28

Quote 12: "I know your ambitions do not lie in the warehouse, that like everybody in the whole wide world -- you've had to -- make sacrifices, but -- Tom -- Tom -- life's not easy, it calls for -- Spartan endurance!" Part 2, Scene 4, pg. 32

Quote 13: "This was the compensation for lives that passed like mine, without any change or adventure. Adventure and change were imminent in this year. They were waiting around the corner for all these kids. Suspended in the mist over Berchtesgaden, caught in the folds of Chamberlain's umbrella. In Spain there was Guernica! But here there was only hot swing music and liquor, dance halls, bars, and movies, and sex that hung in the gloom like a chandelier and flooded the world with brief, deceptive rainbows. . . . All the world was waiting for bombardments!" Part 3, Scene 5, pg. 39

Quote 14: "You are the only young man that I know of who ignores the fact that the future becomes the present, the present becomes the past, and the past turns into everlasting regret if you don't plan for it!" Part 3, Scene 5, pg. 45

Quote 15: "a world of her own -- a world of glass ornaments." Part 3, Scene 5, pg. 48

Quote 16: "Shakespeare" Part 3, Scene 6, pg. 50

Quote 17: "[a]ll pretty girls are a trap, a pretty trap, and men expect them to be." Part 3, Scene 6, pg. 52

Quote 18: "I know I seem dreamy, but inside -- well, I'm boiling! Whenever I pick up a shoe, I shudder a little thinking how short life is and what I am doing! Whatever that means, I know it doesn't mean shoes -- except as something to wear on a traveler's feet!" Part 3, Scene 6, pg. 62

Quote 19: "You think of yourself as having the only problems, as being the only one who is disappointed. But just look around you and you will see lots of people as disappointed as you are." Part 4, Scene 7, pg. 76

Quote 20: "Glass breaks so easily. No matter how careful you are." Part 4, Scene 7, pg. 86

Quote 21: "You don't know things anywhere! You live in a dream: you manufacture illusions." Part 4, Scene 7, pg. 95

Quote 22: "I didn't go to the moon, I went much further -- for time is the longest distance between two places." Part 4, Scene 7, pg. 96

Quote 23: "For nowadays the world is lit by lightning! Blow out your candles, Laura -- and so, goodbye . . ." Part 4, Scene 7, pg. 97