Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

A family crisis brings out the best and the worst in every member of it.

Ignorance – of mortality – is a comfort. A man don't have that comfort, he's the only living thing that conceives of death, that knows what it is. The others go without knowing, which is the way that anything living should go, go without knowing, without any knowledge of it

The human animal is a beast that dies and if he's got money he buys and buys and buys and I think the reason he buys everything he can buy is that in the back of his mind he has the crazy hope that one of his purchases will be life everlasting! – Which it never can be...

It was one of those beautiful, ideal things they tell about in the Greek legends, it couldn't be anything else, you being you, and that's what made it so sad, that's what made it so awful, because it was love that never could be carried through to anything satisfying or even talked about plainly.

I'm not tryin' to whitewash my behaviour, Christ, no! Brick, I'm not good. I don't know why people have to pretend to be good, nobody's good.

Hell, do they ever know it? Nobody says, 'You're dying.' You have to fool them. They have to fool themselves. [...] Why? Because human beings dream of life everlasting, that's the reason! But most of them want it on earth and not in heaven.

I can't see a man but you! Even with my eyes closed, I just see you!

WHY! – am I so catty? – 'Cause I'm consumed with envy an' eaten up with longing?

When something is festering in your memory or your imagination, laws of silence don't work, it's just like shutting a door and locking it on a house on fire in hope of forgetting that the house is burning. But not facing a fire doesn't put it out. Silence about a thing just magnifies it. It grows and festers in silence, becomes malignant...

Later tonight I'm going to tell you I love you an' maybe by that time you'll be drunk enough to believe me.

you have that rare sort of charm that usually only happens in very old or hopelessly sick people, the charm of the defeated. – You look so cool, so cool, so enviably cool.

Living with someone you love can be lonelier – than living entirely alone! – if the one that y' love doesn't love you...