Blanche: I, I, I took the blows in my face and my body! All of those deaths! The long parade to the graveyard! Father, mother! Margaret, that dreadful way! So big with it, it couldn't be put in a coffin! But had to be burned like rubbish! You just come home in time for the funerals, Stella. And funerals are pretty compared to deaths. Funerals are quiet, but deaths–not always.
Blanche:These are love letters, yellowing with antiquity, all from one boy. Give them back to me!...The touch of your hand insults them!...Now that you've touched them I'll burn them...Poems a dead boy wrote. I hurt him the way that you would like to hurt me, but you can't! I'm not young and vulnerable any more. But my young husband was...Everyone has something they won't let others touch because of their intimate nature.
Stella: ... there are things that happen between a man and a woman in the dark–that sort of make everything else seem–unimportant.
Blanche: What you are talking about is brutal desire–just–Desire!–the name of that rattle-trap street-car that bangs through the Quarter, up one old narrow street and down another...
Stella: Haven't you ever ridden on that street-car?
BlBlanche:
It brought me here–where I'm
not wanted and where I'm ashamed to be ...
lBlanche:May I speak plainly?...If you'll forgive me, he's common!...He's like an animal. He has an animal's habits. There's even something subhuman about him. Thousands of years have passed him right by, and there he is! Stanley Kowalski, survivor of the Stone Age, bearing the raw meat home from the kill in the jungle! And you - you here waiting for him. Maybe he'll strike you or maybe grunt and kiss you, that's if kisses have been discovered yet. His poker night you call it. This party of apes!
lBlanche:I don't want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic. I try to give that to people. I do misrepresent things. I don't tell the truth. I tell what ought to be truth.
lBlanche:I used to sit here and she used to sit there. And Death was as close as you are. Death. The opposite is Desire. Oh, how could you wonder? How could you possibly wonder?
lBlanche:Whoever you are, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.