Carson McCullers Quotes

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.

You don’t know what it is to store up a lot of details and then come upon something real.

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.

But the hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes.

I got to wear blinders all the time so I won’t think sideways or in the past.

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.

A writer soon discovers he has no single identity but lives the lives of all the people he creates and his weathers are independent of the actual day around him.

How can the dead be truly dead when they still live in the souls of those who are left behind?

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.

She was afraid of these things that made her suddenly wonder who she was, and what she was going to be in the world, and why she was standing at that minute, seeing a light, or listening, or staring up into the sky: alone.