For 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 MCCULLERSIt 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.
More Carson McCullers Quotes
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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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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.
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The memories of childhood are like clear candles in an acre of night, illuminating fixed scenes from surrounding darkness.
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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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There’s nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book.
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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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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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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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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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She stood in front of the mirror a long time, and finally decided she either looked like a sap or else she looked very beautiful. One or the other.
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Death is the great gamer with a sleeve of tricks.
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Falling in love is the easiest thing in the world. It’s standing in love that matters.
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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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A writer soon discovers he has no single identity but lives the lives of all the people he creates and his weathers are independent of the actual day around him.
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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.
CARSON MCCULLERS