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.
CARSON MCCULLERSIt was better to be in a jail where you could bang the walls than in a jail you could not see.
More Carson McCullers Quotes
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To know who you are, you have to have a place to come from.
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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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And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being loved is intolerable to many.
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The thinking mind is best controlled by the imagination.
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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.
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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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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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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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We are homesick most for the places we have never known.
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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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Next to music beer was best.
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But the hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes.
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The whole world was this symphony, and there was not enough of her to listen… Now that it was over there was only her heart beating like a rabbit and this terrible hurt.
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As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.
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We are torn between nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange.
CARSON MCCULLERS