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.
CARSON MCCULLERSSoutherners 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.
More Carson McCullers Quotes
-
-
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter had such an illumination, beginning my long search for the truth of the story and flashing light into the long two years ahead.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
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.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
A seed grows in writing as in nature. The seed of the idea is developed by both labor and the unconscious, and the struggle that goes on between them.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
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.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
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.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
How can the dead be truly dead when they still live in the souls of those who are left behind?
CARSON MCCULLERS -
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.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
Love of another individual opens a new relation between the personality and the world. The lover responds in a new way to nature and may even write poetry.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
It was better to be in a jail where you could bang the walls than in a jail you could not see.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
I 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 MCCULLERS -
It 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 MCCULLERS -
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.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
But look what the Church has done to Jesus during the last two thousand years. What they have made of Him. How they have turned every word He spoke for their own vile ends. Jesus would be framed and in jail if he was living today.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
There are corporations worth billions of dollars – and hundreds of thousands of people who don’t get to eat.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
Death is the great gamer with a sleeve of tricks.
CARSON MCCULLERS