The Glass Menagerie Memory and the Past Quotes

The audience hears and sees the opening scene in the dining room through both the transparent fourth wall of the building and the transparent gauze portieres of the dining-room arch. It is during this revealing scene that the fourth wall slowly ascends, out of sight. This transparent exterior wall is not brought down again until the very end of the play, during Tom's final speech. (Stage directions, Scene One).

Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things u p my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion. (1.1, Tom).

A blown-up photograph of the father hangs on the wall of the living room, to the left of the archway. It is the face of a very handsome young man in a doughboy's First World War cap. He is gallantly smiling, ineluctably smiling, as if to say "I will be smiling forever." (stage directions, Scene One).

To begin with, I turn back time. I reverse it to that quaint period, the thirties, where the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had failed them, or they had failed their eyes, and so they were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy. (1.1, Tom).

Legend on screen: "Ou sont les neiges." (Scene One, stage directions).

To begin with, I turn back time. I reverse it to that quaint period, the thirties, where the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had failed them, or they had failed their eyes, and so they were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy. (1.1, Tom).

The play is memory. Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental, it is not realistic. In memory everything seems to happen to music. That explains the fiddle in the wings. (1.1, Tom).

The scene is memory and therefore nonrealistic. Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart. The interior is therefore rather dim and poetic. (stage directions, 1.3)

"Sometimes they come when they are least expected! Why, I remember one Sunday afternoon in Blue Mountain-" (1.16, Amanda).

"One Sunday afternoon in Blue Mountain - your mother received - seventeen! - gentlemen callers! Why, sometimes there weren't enough chairs to accommodate them all. We had to send the n***** over to bring in folding chairs from the parish house." (1.21, Amanda).

"Girls in those days knew how to talk, I can tell you." (1.25, Amanda).

"There was young Champ Laughlin who later became vice president of the Delta Planters Bank. Hadley Stevenson who was drowned in Moon Lake and left his widow one hundred and fifty thousand in government bonds. There were the Cutrere brothers, Wesley and Bates. Bates was one of my bright particular beaux! He got in a quarrel with that wild Wainwright boy. They shot it out on the floor of Moon Lake Casino. Bates was shot through the stomach. Died in the ambulance on his way to Memphis. His widow was also well provided-for, came into eight or ten thousand acres, that's all. She married him on the rebound - never loved her - carried my picture on him the night he died! And there was that boy that every girl in the Delta had set her cap for! That beautiful, brilliant young Fitzhugh boy from Green County!" (1.29, Amanda).

"No, dear, you go in front and study your typewriter chart. Or practice your shorthand a little. Stay fresh and pretty! - It's almost time for our gentlemen callers to start arriving. [She flounces girlishly toward the kitchenette] How many do you suppose we're going to entertain this afternoon?" (1.35, Amanda).

She has on one of those cheap or imitation velvety-looking cloth coats with imitation fur collar. Her hat is five or six years old, one of those dreadful cloche hats that were worn in the late Twenties, and she is clutching an enormous black patent leather pocketbook with nickel clasps and initials. This is her full-dress outfit, the one she usually wears to the D.A.R. (Scene Two, stage directions).

He tears the portieres open. The dining-room area is lit with a turgid smoky red glow. (Scene Three, stage directions).

"I was valuable to him as someone who could remember his former glory." (6.1, Tom).

The light dims out on Tom and comes up in the Wingfield living room—a delicate lemony light. It is abut five on a Friday evening of late spring which comes "scattering poems in the sky. (Scene Six stage directions).

A faraway, scratchy rendition of ‘Dardanella" softens the air and gives her strength to move through it. (Scene Six, stage directions).

The music seems to answer his question, while Tom thinks it over. He searches his pockets. (Scene Six stage directions.)

"There was a Jim O'Connor we both knew in high school-[then, with effort] If that is the one that Tom is bringing to dinner-you'll have to excuse me, I won't come to the table." (6.30, Laura).