She stood in front of the mirror a long time, and finally decided she either looked like a sap or else she looked very beautiful. One or the other.
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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And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being loved is intolerable to many.
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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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The Heart is a Lonely Hunter had such an illumination, beginning my long search for the truth of the story and flashing light into the long two years ahead.
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I am not meant to be alone and without you who understands.
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The Heart is a lonely hunter with only one desire!
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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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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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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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We are homesick most for the places we have never known.
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It is music that causes the heart to broaden and the listener to grow cold with ecstasy and fright.
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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.
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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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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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You don’t know what it is to store up a lot of details and then come upon something real.
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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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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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The memories of childhood are like clear candles in an acre of night, illuminating fixed scenes from surrounding darkness.
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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.
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the way i need you is a loneliness i cannot bear.
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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 we can do is go around telling the truth.
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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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I live with the people I create and it has always made my essential loneliness less keen.
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Next to music beer was best.
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A seed grows in writing as in nature. The seed of the idea is developed by both labor and the unconscious, and the struggle that goes on between them.
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