I meditated on love and reasoned it out. I realized what is wrong with us. Men fall in love for the first time. And what do they fall in love with? …They fall in love with a woman. They start at the wrong end of love. They begin at the climax.
CARSON MCCULLERSA 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.
More Carson McCullers Quotes
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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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There is so much truth in children and so little self-consciousness. It always strikes me that they are so capable of losing and finding themselves and also losing and finding those things they feel close to.
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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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All people belong to a We except me. Not to belong to a We makes you too lonesome.
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To know who you are, you have to have a place to come from.
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Love is the bridge that leads from the I sense to the We, and there is a paradox about personal love.
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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.
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I was like a cat always climbing the wrong tree.
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There’s nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book.
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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.
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The memories of childhood are like clear candles in an acre of night, illuminating fixed scenes from surrounding darkness.
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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.
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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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The writer is by nature a dreamer – a conscious dreamer.
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