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 MCCULLERSYou going to traipse all around like you haves to find something lost. You going to work yourself up with excitement. Your heart going to beat hard enough to kill you because you don’t love and don’t have peace. And then some day you going to bust loose and be ruined.
More Carson McCullers Quotes
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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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There are corporations worth billions of dollars – and hundreds of thousands of people who don’t get to eat.
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Writing, for me, is a search for God.
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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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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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It was like they waited to tell each other things that had never been told before. What she had to say was terrible and afraid. But what he would tell her was so true that it would make everything all right.
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Because in some men it is in them to give up everything personal at some time, before it ferments and poisons–throw it to some human being or some human idea. They have to.
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The most fatal thing a man can do is try to stand alone.
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How can the dead be truly dead when they still live in the souls of those who are left behind?
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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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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.
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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 thinking mind is best controlled by the imagination.
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Love is affirmation; it motivates the yes responses and the sense of wider communication. Love casts out fear, and in the security of this togetherness we find contentment, courage.
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We no longer fear the age-old haunting questions: “Who am I?” “Why am I?” “Where am I going?” – and having cast out fear, we can be honest and charitable.
CARSON MCCULLERS