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 MCCULLERSA 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.
More Carson McCullers Quotes
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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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I think we look for the differences in people because it makes us less lonely.
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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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It is music that causes the heart to broaden and the listener to grow cold with ecstasy and fright.
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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.
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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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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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The memories of childhood are like clear candles in an acre of night, illuminating fixed scenes from surrounding darkness.
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There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries.
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Imagination takes humility, love and great courage.
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The world is certainty a sudden place.
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A fellow can’t live without giving his passive acceptance to meanness. Somebody wears his tail to a frazzle for every mouthful we eat and every stitch we wear-and nobody seems to know. Everybody is blind, dumb, and blunt-headed-stupid and mean.
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She stood in front of the mirror a long time, and finally decided she either looked like a sap or else she looked very beautiful. One or the other.
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The music left only this bad hurt in her, and a blankness. She could not remember any of the symphony, not even the last few notes. She tried to remember, but no sound at all came to her. Now that it was over there was only her heart like a rabbit and this terrible hurt.
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For you see, when us people who know run into each other that’s an event. It almost never happens. Sometimes we meet each other and neither guesses that the other is one who knows. That’s a bad thing. It’s happened to me a lot of times. But you see there are so few of us.
CARSON MCCULLERS