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.
CARSON MCCULLERSAfter 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.
More Carson McCullers Quotes
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For fear is a primary source of evil. And when the question “Who am I?” recurs and is unanswered, then fear and frustration project a negative attitude.
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I see a green tree. And to me it is green. And you would call the tree green also. And we would agree on this. But is the colour you see as green the same colour I see as green?
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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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You don’t know what it is to store up a lot of details and then come upon something real.
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As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.
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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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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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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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We are torn between nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange.
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Southerners are the more lonely and spiritually estranged, I think, because we have lived so long in an artificial social system that we insisted was natural and right and just – when all along we knew it wasn’t.
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I am not meant to be alone and without you who understands.
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Resentment is the most precious flower of poverty.
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The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.
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All we can do is go around telling the truth.
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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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