"The future is called 'perhaps,' which is the only possible thing to call the future. And the important thing is not to allow that to scare you"
About this Quote
Calling the future "perhaps" replaces the fantasy of certainty with the discipline of openness. It names the unknown honestly without surrendering to dread. Tennessee Williams turns the indeterminacy that unnerves us into a humane philosophy: the future can only be a conditional, and the work of life is to move toward it anyway.
That perspective fits a writer who made vulnerability his subject. Williams chronicled people standing on the edge of change, their hopes fragile, their plans provisional. The American South in his plays is a landscape of bright dreams and thin ice, a place where the promise of stability often hides fracture. By insisting on "perhaps", he refuses both fatalism and denial. Certainty is an illusion; fear is optional.
The second sentence is the pivot. Not allowing "perhaps" to scare you is a creative and moral stance. It means acting without guarantees, loving without assurances, making art without knowing how it will be received. It is a call to courage that is quiet rather than grand, the daily willingness to keep showing up. Williams knew personally the volatility of success and the swings of public favor, and he often wrote in essays and interviews about how a writer must protect the inner life from these external tremors. Embracing uncertainty becomes a way to preserve freedom of soul.
His characters dramatize the consequences of fear and the cost of its opposite. Tom Wingfield leaves home with more doubt than clarity; Blanche DuBois constructs fictions to ward off the unknown and is undone by them. When fear dictates, illusion hardens and empathy thins. When uncertainty is accepted, possibility returns: the future remains open, and so do we.
To call the future "perhaps" is not a shrug but a vow. It keeps humility and imagination in play, reminding us that destiny is co-written by time and courage, and that the absence of certainty is not the absence of meaning.
That perspective fits a writer who made vulnerability his subject. Williams chronicled people standing on the edge of change, their hopes fragile, their plans provisional. The American South in his plays is a landscape of bright dreams and thin ice, a place where the promise of stability often hides fracture. By insisting on "perhaps", he refuses both fatalism and denial. Certainty is an illusion; fear is optional.
The second sentence is the pivot. Not allowing "perhaps" to scare you is a creative and moral stance. It means acting without guarantees, loving without assurances, making art without knowing how it will be received. It is a call to courage that is quiet rather than grand, the daily willingness to keep showing up. Williams knew personally the volatility of success and the swings of public favor, and he often wrote in essays and interviews about how a writer must protect the inner life from these external tremors. Embracing uncertainty becomes a way to preserve freedom of soul.
His characters dramatize the consequences of fear and the cost of its opposite. Tom Wingfield leaves home with more doubt than clarity; Blanche DuBois constructs fictions to ward off the unknown and is undone by them. When fear dictates, illusion hardens and empathy thins. When uncertainty is accepted, possibility returns: the future remains open, and so do we.
To call the future "perhaps" is not a shrug but a vow. It keeps humility and imagination in play, reminding us that destiny is co-written by time and courage, and that the absence of certainty is not the absence of meaning.
Quote Details
| Topic | Motivational |
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