I was like a cat always climbing the wrong tree.
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
-
-
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.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
In his face there came to be a brooding peace that is seen most often in the faces of the very sorrowful or the very wise. But still he wandered through the streets of the town, always silent and alone.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
Don’t you loathe it when doctors use the word ‘we’ when it applies only and solely to yourself?
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 -
Comparing the Brooklyn that I know with Manhattan is like comparing a comfortable and complacent duenna to her more brilliant and neurotic sister.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
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?
CARSON MCCULLERS -
Because in some men it is in them to give up everything personal at some time, before it ferments and poisons–throw it to some human being or some human idea. They have to.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
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 -
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 -
Wherever you look there’s meanness and corruption. This room, this bottle of grape wine, these fruits in the basket, are all products of profit and loss.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
You don’t know what it is to store up a lot of details and then come upon something real.
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 -
Once you have lived with another, it is a great torture to have to live alone.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being loved is intolerable to many.
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 -
The writer by nature of his profession is a dreamer and a conscious dreamer. He must imagine, and imagination takes humility, love and great courage. How can you create a character without live and the struggle that goes with love?
CARSON MCCULLERS -
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.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
A writer soon discovers he has no single identity but lives the lives of all the people he creates and his weathers are independent of the actual day around him.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
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.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
The writer must hew the phantom rock.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
His own life seemed so solitary, a fragile column supporting nothing amidst the wreckage of the years.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
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.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
It is music that causes the heart to broaden and the listener to grow cold with ecstasy and fright.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
For fear is a primary source of evil. And when the question “Who am I?” recurs and is unanswered, then fear and frustration project a negative attitude.
CARSON MCCULLERS -
the way i need you is a loneliness i cannot bear.
CARSON MCCULLERS