Resentment is the most precious flower of poverty.
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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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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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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When a person knows and can’t make the others understand, what does he do?
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Day and night she had drudged and struggled and thrown her soul into her work, and there was not much of her left over for anything else.
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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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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.
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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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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 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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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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I run these little pieces of myself through her and I come out complete. Now do you follow me?
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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.
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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 lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.
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There are corporations worth billions of dollars – and hundreds of thousands of people who don’t get to eat.
CARSON MCCULLERS