All men are lonely. But sometimes it seems to me that we Americans are the loneliest of all. Our hunger for foreign places and new ways has been with us almost like a national disease. Our literature is stamped with a quality of longing and unrest, and our writers have been great wanderers.
CARSON MCCULLERSThe lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.
More Carson McCullers Quotes
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She wished there was some place where she could go to hum it out loud. Some kind of music was too private to sing in a house cram fall of people. It was funny, too, how lonesome a person could be in a crowded house.
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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 more to say than Hemingway, and God knows, I say it better than Faulkner.
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The whole world was this symphony, and there was not enough of her to listen… Now that it was over there was only her heart beating like a rabbit and this terrible hurt.
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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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To find some lasting comfort in the arms of anothers fire…driven by a desperate hunger to the arms of a neon light, the heart is a lonely hunter when there’s no sign of love in sight!
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Imagination takes humility, love and great courage.
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The writer is by nature a dreamer – a conscious dreamer.
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But the hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes.
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Southerners 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.
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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.
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You don’t know what it is to store up a lot of details and then come upon something real.
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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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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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We are torn between nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange.
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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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Love of another individual opens a new relation between the personality and the world. The lover responds in a new way to nature and may even write poetry.
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The Heart is a lonely hunter with only one desire!
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Writing, for me, is a search for God.
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And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being loved is intolerable to many.
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Can you wonder it is so miserable? Do you know how men should love? A tree. A rock. A cloud.
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Doctors, by God; washing their hands, looking out windows, fiddling with dreadful things while you are stretched out on a table or half undressed on a chair.
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Comparing the Brooklyn that I know with Manhattan is like comparing a comfortable and complacent duenna to her more brilliant and neurotic sister.
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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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Love 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.
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Love is the main generator of all good writing… Love, passion, compassion, are all welded together.
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