Carson McCullers Quotes

78 Sourced Quotes

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. I live with the people I create and it has always made my essential loneliness less keen.

Carson McCullers
The mind is like a richly woven tapestry in which the colors are distilled from the experiences of the senses, and the design drawn from the convolutions of the intellect.

Carson McCullers
There's nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book.

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

Carson McCullers
That was the best of all. To speak the truth and be attended.

Carson McCullers
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. 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. The xenophobic individual can only reject and destroy, as the xenophobic nation inevitably makes war.

Carson McCullers
Falling in love is the easiest thing in the world. It's standing in love that matters.

Carson McCullers
The memories of childhood have a strange shuttling quality, and areas of darkness ring the spaces of light. The memories of childhood are like clear candles in an acre of night, illuminating fixed scenes from surrounding darkness.

Carson McCullers
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.

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

Carson McCullers
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.

Carson McCullers
Remembering that Alison was not well, Leonora tried to look sickly also, as that was her notion of the proper behavior in a sickroom.

Carson McCullers
A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lillies of the swamp.

Carson McCullers
Owing to the fact he was a mute they were able to give him all the qualities they wanted him to have.

Carson McCullers
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.

Carson McCullers
And his heart balanced between pity and the natural instinct for separation that divides the sound from the infirm.

Carson McCullers
If you walk along the main street on an August afternoon there is nothing whatsoever to do.

Carson McCullers
When a person knows and can't make the others understand, what does he do?

Carson McCullers
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.

Carson McCullers
There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries.

Carson McCullers
It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With Americans, it is a national trait, as native to us as the roller-coaster or the jukebox. It is no simple longing for the home town or country of our birth. The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.

Carson McCullers
Her face felt like it was scattered in pieces and she could not keep it straight. The feeling was a whole lot worse than being hungry for any dinner, yet it was like that. I want—I want—I want—was all that she could think about—but just what this real want was she did no know.

Carson McCullers
I want - I want - I want - was all that she could think about - but just what this real want was she did not know.

Carson McCullers