The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.
CARSON MCCULLERSThe writer by nature of his profession is a dreamer and a conscious dreamer. He must imagine, and imagination takes humility, love and great courage. How can you create a character without live and the struggle that goes with love?
More Carson McCullers Quotes
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Because 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.
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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 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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A 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.
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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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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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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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We no longer fear the age-old haunting questions: “Who am I?” “Why am I?” “Where am I going?” – and having cast out fear, we can be honest and charitable.
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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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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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When a person knows and can’t make the others understand, what does he do?
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The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.
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But no value has been put on human life; it is given to us free and taken without being paid for. What is it worth?
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Maybe it was a thing that could not be spoken with words or writing. Maybe he would have to let her understand this in a different way. That was the feeling she had with him.
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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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