Comparing the Brooklyn that I know with Manhattan is like comparing a comfortable and complacent duenna to her more brilliant and neurotic sister.
CARSON MCCULLERS
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.
More Carson McCullers Quotes
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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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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.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
How can the dead be truly dead when they still live in the souls of those who are left behind?
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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.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
The 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?
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.
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All people belong to a We except me. Not to belong to a We makes you too lonesome.
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All we can do is go around telling the truth.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
We are torn between nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange.
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The music left only this bad hurt in her, and a blankness. She could not remember any of the symphony, not even the last few notes. She tried to remember, but no sound at all came to her. Now that it was over there was only her heart like a rabbit and this terrible hurt.
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It is music that causes the heart to broaden and the listener to grow cold with ecstasy and fright.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
This music was her-the real plain her…This music did not take a long time or a short time. It did not have anything to do with time going by at all. She sat with her arms around her legs, biting her salty knee very hard.
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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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She was afraid of these things that made her suddenly wonder who she was, and what she was going to be in the world, and why she was standing at that minute, seeing a light, or listening, or staring up into the sky: alone.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
Owing to the fact he was a mute they were able to give him all the qualities they wanted him to have.
CARSON MCCULLERS