The heart of a hurt child can shrink so that forever afterward it is hard and pitted as the seed of a peach. Or again, the heart of such a child may fester and swell until it is a misery to carry within the body, easily chafed and hurt by the most ordinary things.
CARSON MCCULLERSSoutherners are the more lonely and spiritually estranged, I think, because we have lived so long in an artificial social system that we insisted was natural and right and just – when all along we knew it wasn’t.
More Carson McCullers Quotes
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We live in the richest country in the world. There’s plenty and to spare for no man, woman, or child to be in want.
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A writer soon discovers he has no single identity but lives the lives of all the people he creates and his weathers are independent of the actual day around him.
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Once you have lived with another, it is a great torture to have to live alone.
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We are homesick most for the places we have never known.
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A fellow can’t live without giving his passive acceptance to meanness. Somebody wears his tail to a frazzle for every mouthful we eat and every stitch we wear-and nobody seems to know. Everybody is blind, dumb, and blunt-headed-stupid and mean.
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I have never gone to a doctor in my adult life, feeling instinctively that doctors meant either cutting or, just as bad, diet.
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Sometimes this fellow’s music was like little colored pieces of crystal candy, and other times it was the softest, saddest thing she had ever imagined about.
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What are the sources of an illumination? To me, they come after hours of searching and keeping my soul ready. Yet they come in a flash, as a religious phenomenon.
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The trouble with me is that for a long time I have just been an I person.
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She was afraid of these things that made her suddenly wonder who she was, and what she was going to be in the world, and why she was standing at that minute, seeing a light, or listening, or staring up into the sky: alone.
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Day and night she had drudged and struggled and thrown her soul into her work, and there was not much of her left over for anything else.
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The Heart is a lonely hunter with only one desire!
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They are the we of me.
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She stood in front of the mirror a long time, and finally decided she either looked like a sap or else she looked very beautiful. One or the other.
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The most fatal thing a man can do is try to stand alone.
CARSON MCCULLERS