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.
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
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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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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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This was her, Mick Kelly, walking in the daytime and by herself at night. In the hot sun and in the dark with all the plans and feelings.
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The writer must hew the phantom rock.
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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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Love is the main generator of all good writing… Love, passion, compassion, are all welded together.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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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 beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved.
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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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Owing to the fact he was a mute they were able to give him all the qualities they wanted him to have.
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Once you have lived with another, it is a great torture to have to live alone.
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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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Resentment is the most precious flower of poverty.
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To know who you are, you have to have a place to come from.
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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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Sometimes this fellow’s music was like little colored pieces of crystal candy, and other times it was the softest, saddest thing she had ever imagined about.
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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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Love is the bridge that leads from the I sense to the We, and there is a paradox about personal love.
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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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The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.
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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.
CARSON MCCULLERS