The memories of childhood are like clear candles in an acre of night, illuminating fixed scenes from surrounding darkness.
CARSON MCCULLERSThe dimensions of a work of art are seldom realized by the author until the work is accomplished. It is like a flowering dream. Ideas grow, budding silently, and there are a thousand illuminations coming day by day as the work progresses.
More Carson McCullers Quotes
-
-
It 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.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
Maybe it was a thing that could not be spoken with words or writing. Maybe he would have to let her understand this in a different way. That was the feeling she had with him.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
The most fatal thing a man can do is try to stand alone.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
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 MCCULLERS -
The writer must hew the phantom rock.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lillies of the swamp.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
For 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 MCCULLERS -
The value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
For fear is a primary source of evil. And when the question “Who am I?” recurs and is unanswered, then fear and frustration project a negative attitude.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
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.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
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.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
When a person knows and can’t make the others understand, what does he do?
CARSON MCCULLERS -
I want – I want – I want – was all that she could think about – but just what this real want was she did not know.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
You don’t know what it is to store up a lot of details and then come upon something real.
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