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 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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The most fatal thing a man can do is try to stand alone.
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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 affirmation; it motivates the yes responses and the sense of wider communication. Love casts out fear, and in the security of this togetherness we find contentment, courage.
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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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Comparing the Brooklyn that I know with Manhattan is like comparing a comfortable and complacent duenna to her more brilliant and neurotic sister.
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There is so much truth in children and so little self-consciousness. It always strikes me that they are so capable of losing and finding themselves and also losing and finding those things they feel close to.
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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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I have never gone to a doctor in my adult life, feeling instinctively that doctors meant either cutting or, just as bad, diet.
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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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Doctors, by God; washing their hands, looking out windows, fiddling with dreadful things while you are stretched out on a table or half undressed on a chair.
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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.
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But look what the Church has done to Jesus during the last two thousand years. What they have made of Him. How they have turned every word He spoke for their own vile ends. Jesus would be framed and in jail if he was living today.
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All 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.
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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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The memories of childhood are like clear candles in an acre of night, illuminating fixed scenes from surrounding darkness.
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Imagination takes humility, love and great courage.
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I see a green tree. And to me it is green. And you would call the tree green also. And we would agree on this. But is the colour you see as green the same colour I see as green?
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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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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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To know who you are, you have to have a place to come from.
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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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The value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself.
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I live with the people I create and it has always made my essential loneliness less keen.
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Once you have lived with another, it is a great torture to have to live alone.
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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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justice itself is a chimera, a delusion. Justice is not a flat yardstick, applied in equal measure to an equal situation.
CARSON MCCULLERS