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 MCCULLERSBeing 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.
More Carson McCullers Quotes
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Love is the bridge that leads from the I sense to the We, and there is a paradox about personal love.
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The world is certainty a sudden place.
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This was her, Mick Kelly, walking in the daytime and by herself at night. In the hot sun and in the dark with all the plans and feelings.
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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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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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Death is the great gamer with a sleeve of tricks.
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Next to music beer was best.
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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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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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The trouble with me is that for a long time I have just been an I person.
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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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The writer is by nature a dreamer – a conscious dreamer.
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The Heart is a lonely hunter with only one desire!
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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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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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There is so much truth in children and so little self-consciousness. It always strikes me that they are so capable of losing and finding themselves and also losing and finding those things they feel close to.
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It was like she was cheated. Only nobody had cheated her. So there was nobody to take it out on. However, just the same she had that feeling. Cheated.
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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´m a stranger in a strange land.
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The most fatal thing a man can do is try to stand alone.
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Nothing is so musical as the sound of pouring bourbon for the first drink on a Sunday morning. Not Bach or Schubert or any of those masters.
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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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How can the dead be truly dead when they still live in the souls of those who are left behind?
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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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There are corporations worth billions of dollars – and hundreds of thousands of people who don’t get to eat.
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Jesus would be framed and in jail if he was living today.
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