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 MCCULLERSIf you look around, at times the value may seem to be little or nothing at all. Often after you have sweated and tried and things are not better for you, there comes a feeling deep down in the soul that you are not worth much.
More Carson McCullers Quotes
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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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There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries.
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It is music that causes the heart to broaden and the listener to grow cold with ecstasy and fright.
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This fear is one of the horrors of an author’s life. Where does work come from? What chance, what small episode will start the chain of creation?
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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.
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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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The memories of childhood are like clear candles in an acre of night, illuminating fixed scenes from surrounding darkness.
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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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The curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many.
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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.
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We wander, question. But the answer waits in each separate heart – the answer of our own identity and the way by which we can master loneliness and feel that at last we belong.
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The thinking mind is best controlled by the imagination.
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I run these little pieces of myself through her and I come out complete. Now do you follow me?
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But you haven’t never loved God nor even nair person. You hard and tough as cowhide. But just the same I knows you. This afternoon you going to roam all over the place without never being satisfied.
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All we can do is go around telling the truth.
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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?
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The mind is like a richly woven tapestry in which the colors are distilled from the experiences of the senses, and the design drawn from the convolutions of the intellect.
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I got to wear blinders all the time so I won’t think sideways or in the past.
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There are corporations worth billions of dollars – and hundreds of thousands of people who don’t get to eat.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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The people dreamed and fought and slept as much as ever. And by habit they shortened their thoughts so that they would not wander out into the darkness beyond tomorrow.
CARSON MCCULLERS