Songs my mother taught me

Recently, a friend lent me several books. Among them, Marlon Brando's Songs My Mother Taught Me. This is Brando quoting from a letter the playwright Tennessee Williams wrote to film director Eli Kazan about the characters in A Streetcar Named Desire:

"There are no 'good' or 'bad" people," Tennessee wrote. "Some are a little better or a little worse, but all are activated more by misunderstanding than malice. A blindness to what is going on in each other's hearts. . . nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own egos. That is the way we all see each other in life. Vanity, fear, desire, competition -- all such distortions within our own egos -- condition our vision of those in relation to us. Add to those distortions in our own egos the corresponding distortions in the egos of others, and you see how cloudy the glass must become through which we look at each other. That's how it is in all living relationships except when there is that rare case of two people who love intensely enough to burn through all those layers of opacity and see each other's naked hearts. Such cases are purely theoretical to me. . ."