Once you have lived with another, it is a great torture to have to live alone.
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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I was like a cat always climbing the wrong tree.
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The curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many.
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The value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself.
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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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People, unless they are nilly-willy or very sick, cannot be taken into the hands and be changed overnight into somthing more worth-while and profitable.
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This fear is one of the horrors of an author’s life. Where does work come from? What chance, what small episode will start the chain of creation?
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Writing, for me, is a search for God.
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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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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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There is no stillness like the quiet of the first cold nights in the fall.
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The closest thing to being cared for is to care for someone else.
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The writer must hew the phantom rock.
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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.
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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 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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They are the we of me.
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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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The xenophobic individual can only reject and destroy, as the xenophobic nation inevitably makes war.
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The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.
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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 wander, question. But the answer waits in each separate heart – the answer of our own identity and the way by which we can master loneliness and feel that at last we belong.
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But look what the Church has done to Jesus during the last two thousand years. What they have made of Him. How they have turned every word He spoke for their own vile ends. Jesus would be framed and in jail if he was living today.
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The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved.
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A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lillies of the swamp.
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I got to wear blinders all the time so I won’t think sideways or in the past.
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I want – I want – I want – was all that she could think about – but just what this real want was she did not know.
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