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.
CARSON MCCULLERSI once wrote a story about a writer who could not write anymore, and my friend Tennessee Williams said, ‘How could you dare write that story, it’s the most frightening work I have ever read.’ I was pretty well sunk while I was writing it.
More Carson McCullers Quotes
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We are torn between nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange.
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A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lillies of the swamp.
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Maybe it was a thing that could not be spoken with words or writing. Maybe he would have to let her understand this in a different way. That was the feeling she had with him.
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Can you wonder it is so miserable? Do you know how men should love? A tree. A rock. A cloud.
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The writer is by nature a dreamer – a conscious dreamer.
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The writer must hew the phantom rock.
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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.
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When a person knows and can’t make the others understand, what does he do?
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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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The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.
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The xenophobic individual can only reject and destroy, as the xenophobic nation inevitably makes war.
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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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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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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.
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And in addition to this our country was founded on what should have been a great, true principle – the freedom, equality, and rights of each individual. Huh! And what has come of that start?
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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.
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The Heart is a lonely hunter with only one desire!
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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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I see a green tree. And to me it is green. And you would call the tree green also. And we would agree on this. But is the colour you see as green the same colour I see as green?
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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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The human heart is a lonely hunter-but the search for us southerners is more anguished.
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the way i need you is a loneliness i cannot bear.
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I have more to say than Hemingway, and God knows, I say it better than Faulkner.
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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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The closest thing to being cared for is to care for someone else.
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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.
CARSON MCCULLERS