I live with the people I create and it has always made my essential loneliness less keen.
CARSON MCCULLERSThere’s nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book.
More Carson McCullers Quotes
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Maybe when people longed for a thing that bad the longing made them trust in anything that might give it to them.
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I 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.
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Love is the main generator of all good writing… Love, passion, compassion, are all welded together.
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The writer must hew the phantom rock.
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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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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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But look what the Church has done to Jesus during the last two thousand years. What they have made of Him. How they have turned every word He spoke for their own vile ends. Jesus would be framed and in jail if he was living today.
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The memories of childhood have a strange shuttling quality, and areas of darkness ring the spaces of light.
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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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To know who you are, you have to have a place to come from.
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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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Doctors, by God; washing their hands, looking out windows, fiddling with dreadful things while you are stretched out on a table or half undressed on a chair.
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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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And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being loved is intolerable to many.
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I have never gone to a doctor in my adult life, feeling instinctively that doctors meant either cutting or, just as bad, diet.
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