For you see, when us people who know run into each other that’s an event. It almost never happens. Sometimes we meet each other and neither guesses that the other is one who knows. That’s a bad thing. It’s happened to me a lot of times. But you see there are so few of us.
CARSON MCCULLERSWe are torn between nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange.
More Carson McCullers Quotes
-
-
I once wrote a story about a writer who could not write anymore, and my friend Tennessee Williams said, ‘How could you dare write that story, it’s the most frightening work I have ever read.’ I was pretty well sunk while I was writing it.
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 -
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 -
The curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
If you look around, at times the value may seem to be little or nothing at all. Often after you have sweated and tried and things are not better for you, there comes a feeling deep down in the soul that you are not worth much.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
There’s nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
The xenophobic individual can only reject and destroy, as the xenophobic nation inevitably makes war.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
It is music that causes the heart to broaden and the listener to grow cold with ecstasy and fright.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
The memories of childhood are like clear candles in an acre of night, illuminating fixed scenes from surrounding darkness.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
The Heart is a lonely hunter with only one desire!
CARSON MCCULLERS -
To know who you are, you have to have a place to come from.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
The 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 -
As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
The writer by nature of his profession is a dreamer and a conscious dreamer. He must imagine, and imagination takes humility, love and great courage. How can you create a character without live and the struggle that goes with love?
CARSON MCCULLERS -
People, unless they are nilly-willy or very sick, cannot be taken into the hands and be changed overnight into somthing more worth-while and profitable.
CARSON MCCULLERS