To know who you are, you have to have a place to come from.
CARSON MCCULLERSSometimes this fellow’s music was like little colored pieces of crystal candy, and other times it was the softest, saddest thing she had ever imagined about.
More Carson McCullers Quotes
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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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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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Love is the bridge that leads from the I sense to the We, and there is a paradox about personal love.
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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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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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I once wrote a story about a writer who could not write anymore, and my friend Tennessee Williams said, ‘How could you dare write that story, it’s the most frightening work I have ever read.’ I was pretty well sunk while I was writing it.
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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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I was like a cat always climbing the wrong tree.
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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.
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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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The trouble with me is that for a long time I have just been an I person.
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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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Can you wonder it is so miserable? Do you know how men should love? A tree. A rock. A cloud.
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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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I live with the people I create and it has always made my essential loneliness less keen.
CARSON MCCULLERS