I live with the people I create and it has always made my essential loneliness less keen.
CARSON MCCULLERSYou don’t know what it is to store up a lot of details and then come upon something real.
More Carson McCullers Quotes
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The bewildered soul can answer only: “Since I do not understand ‘Who I am,’ I only know what I am not.” The corollary of this emotional incertitude is snobbism, intolerance and racial hate.
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Through the lies, she lived vicariously. The lies doubled the little of her existence that was left over from work and augmented the little rag end of her personal life.
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The dimensions of a work of art are seldom realized by the author until the work is accomplished. It is like a flowering dream. Ideas grow, budding silently, and there are a thousand illuminations coming day by day as the work progresses.
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justice itself is a chimera, a delusion. Justice is not a flat yardstick, applied in equal measure to an equal situation.
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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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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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Don’t you loathe it when doctors use the word ‘we’ when it applies only and solely to yourself?
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I must go home periodically to renew my sense of horror.
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As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.
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It was better to be in a jail where you could bang the walls than in a jail you could not see.
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She was afraid of these things that made her suddenly wonder who she was, and what she was going to be in the world, and why she was standing at that minute, seeing a light, or listening, or staring up into the sky: alone.
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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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It is music that causes the heart to broaden and the listener to grow cold with ecstasy and fright.
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In 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.
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The closest thing to being cared for is to care for someone else.
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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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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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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.
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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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To find some lasting comfort in the arms of anothers fire…driven by a desperate hunger to the arms of a neon light, the heart is a lonely hunter when there’s no sign of love in sight!
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What are the sources of an illumination? To me, they come after hours of searching and keeping my soul ready. Yet they come in a flash, as a religious phenomenon.
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Jesus would be framed and in jail if he was living today.
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After 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.
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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.
CARSON MCCULLERS