His own life seemed so solitary, a fragile column supporting nothing amidst the wreckage of the years.
CARSON MCCULLERSAll 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.
More Carson McCullers Quotes
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And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being loved is intolerable to many.
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Don’t you loathe it when doctors use the word ‘we’ when it applies only and solely to yourself?
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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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As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.
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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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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.
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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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I’m not explaining this right. What happened was this. There were these beautiful feelings and loose little pleasures inside me. And this woman was something like an assembly line for my soul.
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They are the we of me.
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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 closest thing to being cared for is to care for someone else.
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There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries.
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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.
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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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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