I meditated on love and reasoned it out. I realized what is wrong with us. Men fall in love for the first time. And what do they fall in love with? …They fall in love with a woman. They start at the wrong end of love. They begin at the climax.
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
-
-
I want – I want – I want – was all that she could think about – but just what this real want was she did not know.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being loved is intolerable to many.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
I run these little pieces of myself through her and I come out complete. Now do you follow me?
CARSON MCCULLERS -
Sometimes this fellow’s music was like little colored pieces of crystal candy, and other times it was the softest, saddest thing she had ever imagined about.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
For in a swift radiance of illumination he saw a glimpse of human struggle and valor. Of the endless fluid passage of the humanity through endless time. And of those who labor and of those who – one word- love. His soul expanded. But for a moment only. For in him, he felt a warning, a shaft of terror.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
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.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
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?
CARSON MCCULLERS -
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.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
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.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
I have never gone to a doctor in my adult life, feeling instinctively that doctors meant either cutting or, just as bad, diet.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
But no value has been put on human life; it is given to us free and taken without being paid for. What is it worth?
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.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
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.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
justice itself is a chimera, a delusion. Justice is not a flat yardstick, applied in equal measure to an equal situation.
CARSON MCCULLERS