His own life seemed so solitary, a fragile column supporting nothing amidst the wreckage of the years.
CARSON MCCULLERSI 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.
More Carson McCullers Quotes
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All we can do is go around telling the truth.
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Love of another individual opens a new relation between the personality and the world. The lover responds in a new way to nature and may even write poetry.
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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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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 beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved.
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Being 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.
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The writer is by nature a dreamer – a conscious dreamer.
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Love is the main generator of all good writing… Love, passion, compassion, are all welded together.
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People, unless they are nilly-willy or very sick, cannot be taken into the hands and be changed overnight into somthing more worth-while and profitable.
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When a person knows and can’t make the others understand, what does he do?
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The most fatal thing a man can do is try to stand alone.
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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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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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Through the lies, she lived vicariously. The lies doubled the little of her existence that was left over from work and augmented the little rag end of her personal life.
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the way i need you is a loneliness i cannot bear.
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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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The whole world was this symphony, and there was not enough of her to listen… Now that it was over there was only her heart beating like a rabbit and this terrible hurt.
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I think we look for the differences in people because it makes us less lonely.
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Love is a joint experience between two persons — but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved.
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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.
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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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The memories of childhood have a strange shuttling quality, and areas of darkness ring the spaces of light.
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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.
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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 corporations worth billions of dollars – and hundreds of thousands of people who don’t get to eat.
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The dimensions of a work of art are seldom realized by the author until the work is accomplished. It is like a flowering dream. Ideas grow, budding silently, and there are a thousand illuminations coming day by day as the work progresses.
CARSON MCCULLERS