Falling in love is the easiest thing in the world. It’s standing in love that matters.
CARSON MCCULLERSFalling in love is the easiest thing in the world. It’s standing in love that matters.
CARSON MCCULLERSBecause 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.
CARSON MCCULLERSIn his face there came to be a brooding peace that is seen most often in the faces of the very sorrowful or the very wise. But still he wandered through the streets of the town, always silent and alone.
CARSON MCCULLERSThe most fatal thing a man can do is try to stand alone.
CARSON MCCULLERSI must go home periodically to renew my sense of horror.
CARSON MCCULLERSThis 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?
CARSON MCCULLERSI meditated on love and reasoned it out. I realized what is wrong with us. Men fall in love for the first time. And what do they fall in love with? …They fall in love with a woman. They start at the wrong end of love. They begin at the climax.
CARSON MCCULLERSFor in a swift radiance of illumination he saw a glimpse of human struggle and valor. Of the endless fluid passage of the humanity through endless time. And of those who labor and of those who – one word- love. His soul expanded. But for a moment only. For in him, he felt a warning, a shaft of terror.
CARSON MCCULLERSNext to music beer was best.
CARSON MCCULLERSThere 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.
CARSON MCCULLERSI 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.
CARSON MCCULLERSIt 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.
CARSON MCCULLERSThis music was her-the real plain her…This music did not take a long time or a short time. It did not have anything to do with time going by at all. She sat with her arms around her legs, biting her salty knee very hard.
CARSON MCCULLERSA fellow can’t live without giving his passive acceptance to meanness. Somebody wears his tail to a frazzle for every mouthful we eat and every stitch we wear-and nobody seems to know. Everybody is blind, dumb, and blunt-headed-stupid and mean.
CARSON MCCULLERSThe seed of the idea is developed by both labor and the unconscious, and the struggle that goes on between them.
CARSON MCCULLERSI live with the people I create and it has always made my essential loneliness less keen.
CARSON MCCULLERS