To know who you are, you have to have a place to come from.
CARSON MCCULLERSI’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.
More Carson McCullers Quotes
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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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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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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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But no value has been put on human life; it is given to us free and taken without being paid for. What is it worth?
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You 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.
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The human heart is a lonely hunter-but the search for us southerners is more anguished.
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All we can do is go around telling the truth.
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The memories of childhood have a strange shuttling quality, and areas of darkness ring the spaces of light.
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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 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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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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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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I have more to say than Hemingway, and God knows, I say it better than Faulkner.
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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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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.
CARSON MCCULLERS






