All people belong to a We except me. Not to belong to a We makes you too lonesome.
CARSON MCCULLERSIt was like she was cheated. Only nobody had cheated her. So there was nobody to take it out on. However, just the same she had that feeling. Cheated.
More Carson McCullers Quotes
-
-
Love is a joint experience between two persons — but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
The mind is like a richly woven tapestry in which the colors are distilled from the experiences of the senses, and the design drawn from the convolutions of the intellect.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
Through the lies, she lived vicariously. The lies doubled the little of her existence that was left over from work and augmented the little rag end of her personal life.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
This fear is one of the horrors of an author’s life. Where does work come from? What chance, what small episode will start the chain of creation?
CARSON MCCULLERS -
I meditated on love and reasoned it out. I realized what is wrong with us. Men fall in love for the first time. And what do they fall in love with? …They fall in love with a woman. They start at the wrong end of love. They begin at the climax.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
But no value has been put on human life; it is given to us free and taken without being paid for. What is it worth?
CARSON MCCULLERS -
The music left only this bad hurt in her, and a blankness. She could not remember any of the symphony, not even the last few notes. She tried to remember, but no sound at all came to her. Now that it was over there was only her heart like a rabbit and this terrible hurt.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
But look what the Church has done to Jesus during the last two thousand years. What they have made of Him. How they have turned every word He spoke for their own vile ends. Jesus would be framed and in jail if he was living today.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
The bewildered soul can answer only: “Since I do not understand ‘Who I am,’ I only know what I am not.” The corollary of this emotional incertitude is snobbism, intolerance and racial hate.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
It was better to be in a jail where you could bang the walls than in a jail you could not see.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
The writer is by nature a dreamer – a conscious dreamer.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
To find some lasting comfort in the arms of anothers fire…driven by a desperate hunger to the arms of a neon light, the heart is a lonely hunter when there’s no sign of love in sight!
CARSON MCCULLERS -
I live with the people I create and it has always made my essential loneliness less keen.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
The trouble with me is that for a long time I have just been an I person.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
I’m not explaining this right. What happened was this. There were these beautiful feelings and loose little pleasures inside me. And this woman was something like an assembly line for my soul.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
Once you have lived with another, it is a great torture to have to live alone.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
Don’t you loathe it when doctors use the word ‘we’ when it applies only and solely to yourself?
CARSON MCCULLERS -
The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
justice itself is a chimera, a delusion. Justice is not a flat yardstick, applied in equal measure to an equal situation.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
But the hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
And in addition to this our country was founded on what should have been a great, true principle – the freedom, equality, and rights of each individual. Huh! And what has come of that start?
CARSON MCCULLERS -
You don’t know what it is to store up a lot of details and then come upon something real.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
All men are lonely. But sometimes it seems to me that we Americans are the loneliest of all. Our hunger for foreign places and new ways has been with us almost like a national disease. Our literature is stamped with a quality of longing and unrest, and our writers have been great wanderers.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
Death is the great gamer with a sleeve of tricks.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
After the first establishment of identity there comes the imperative need to lose this new-found sense of separateness and to belong to something larger and more powerful than the weak, lonely self. The sense of moral isolation is intolerable to us.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
I live with the people I create and it has always made my essential loneliness less keen.
CARSON MCCULLERS