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 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.
More Carson McCullers Quotes
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Maybe when people longed for a thing that bad the longing made them trust in anything that might give it to them.
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Being human, she suffered from this lack and did what she could to make up for it. If she passed the evening bent over a table in the library and later declared that she had spent that time playing cards, it was as though she had managed to do both those things.
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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.
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This was her, Mick Kelly, walking in the daytime and by herself at night. In the hot sun and in the dark with all the plans and feelings.
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When a person knows and can’t make the others understand, what does he do?
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Writing, for me, is a search for God.
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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?
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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.
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I see a green tree. And to me it is green. And you would call the tree green also. And we would agree on this. But is the colour you see as green the same colour I see as green?
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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?
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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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Imagination takes humility, love and great courage.
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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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The most fatal thing a man can do is try to stand alone.
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We are torn between nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange.
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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?
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Death is the great gamer with a sleeve of tricks.
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The closest thing to being cared for is to care for someone else.
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Don’t you loathe it when doctors use the word ‘we’ when it applies only and solely to yourself?
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Nothing is so musical as the sound of pouring bourbon for the first drink on a Sunday morning. Not Bach or Schubert or any of those masters.
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The writer is by nature a dreamer – a conscious dreamer.
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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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This music was her-the real plain her…This music did not take a long time or a short time. It did not have anything to do with time going by at all. She sat with her arms around her legs, biting her salty knee very hard.
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It was better to be in a jail where you could bang the walls than in a jail you could not see.
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His own life seemed so solitary, a fragile column supporting nothing amidst the wreckage of the years.
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The xenophobic individual can only reject and destroy, as the xenophobic nation inevitably makes war.
CARSON MCCULLERS