I am not meant to be alone and without you who understands.
CARSON MCCULLERSI am not meant to be alone and without you who understands.
CARSON MCCULLERSI have more to say than Hemingway, and God knows, I say it better than Faulkner.
CARSON MCCULLERSThere is no stillness like the quiet of the first cold nights in the fall.
CARSON MCCULLERSYou going to traipse all around like you haves to find something lost. You going to work yourself up with excitement. Your heart going to beat hard enough to kill you because you don’t love and don’t have peace. And then some day you going to bust loose and be ruined.
CARSON MCCULLERSBut the hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes.
CARSON MCCULLERSWe no longer fear the age-old haunting questions: “Who am I?” “Why am I?” “Where am I going?” – and having cast out fear, we can be honest and charitable.
CARSON MCCULLERSThe world is certainty a sudden place.
CARSON MCCULLERSBut you haven’t never loved God nor even nair person. You hard and tough as cowhide. But just the same I knows you. This afternoon you going to roam all over the place without never being satisfied.
CARSON MCCULLERSFor in a swift radiance of illumination he saw a glimpse of human struggle and valor. Of the endless fluid passage of the humanity through endless time. And of those who labor and of those who – one word- love. His soul expanded. But for a moment only. For in him, he felt a warning, a shaft of terror.
CARSON MCCULLERSLove 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 MCCULLERSI 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 MCCULLERSThe writer must hew the phantom rock.
CARSON MCCULLERSThe 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 MCCULLERSThe memories of childhood have a strange shuttling quality, and areas of darkness ring the spaces of light.
CARSON MCCULLERSWriting, for me, is a search for God.
CARSON MCCULLERSThe people dreamed and fought and slept as much as ever. And by habit they shortened their thoughts so that they would not wander out into the darkness beyond tomorrow.
CARSON MCCULLERS