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 MCCULLERSComparing the Brooklyn that I know with Manhattan is like comparing a comfortable and complacent duenna to her more brilliant and neurotic sister.
More Carson McCullers Quotes
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They are the we of me.
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The curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many.
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Love is a joint experience between two persons — but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved.
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A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lillies of the swamp.
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Comparing the Brooklyn that I know with Manhattan is like comparing a comfortable and complacent duenna to her more brilliant and neurotic sister.
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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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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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Death is the great gamer with a sleeve of tricks.
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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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Southerners are the more lonely and spiritually estranged, I think, because we have lived so long in an artificial social system that we insisted was natural and right and just – when all along we knew it wasn’t.
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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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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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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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Resentment is the most precious flower of poverty.
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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