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 MCCULLERSLove 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.
More Carson McCullers Quotes
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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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I have never gone to a doctor in my adult life, feeling instinctively that doctors meant either cutting or, just as bad, diet.
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The xenophobic individual can only reject and destroy, as the xenophobic nation inevitably makes war.
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Once you have lived with another, it is a great torture to have to live alone.
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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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There is so much truth in children and so little self-consciousness. It always strikes me that they are so capable of losing and finding themselves and also losing and finding those things they feel close to.
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Doctors, by God; washing their hands, looking out windows, fiddling with dreadful things while you are stretched out on a table or half undressed on a chair.
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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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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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Imagination takes humility, love and great courage.
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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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The people dreamed and fought and slept as much as ever. And by habit they shortened their thoughts so that they would not wander out into the darkness beyond tomorrow.
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As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.
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The world is certainty a sudden place.
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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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Nothing is so musical as the sound of pouring bourbon for the first drink on a Sunday morning. Not Bach or Schubert or any of those masters.
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Jesus would be framed and in jail if he was living today.
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We are torn between nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange.
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For you see, when us people who know run into each other that’s an event. It almost never happens. Sometimes we meet each other and neither guesses that the other is one who knows. That’s a bad thing. It’s happened to me a lot of times. But you see there are so few of us.
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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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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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We live in the richest country in the world. There’s plenty and to spare for no man, woman, or child to be in want.
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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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Can you wonder it is so miserable? Do you know how men should love? A tree. A rock. A cloud.
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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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I am not meant to be alone and without you who understands.
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