Carson McCullers Quotes

78 Sourced Quotes

It was better to be in a jail where you could bang the walls than in a jail you could not see.

Carson McCullers
Sunday afternoons are the longest afternoons of all...

Carson McCullers
There are those who know and those who don't know. And for every ten thousand who don't know there's only one who knows. That's the miracle of all time—the fact that these millions know so much but don't know this.

Carson McCullers
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. And in addition to this our country was founded on what should have been a great, true principle - the freedom, equality, and rights of each individual. Huh! And what has come of that start? There are corporations worth billions of dollars - and hundreds of thousands of people who don't get to eat.

Carson McCullers
But all the time-no matter what she was doing-there was music.

Carson McCullers
His own life seemed so solitary, a fragile column supporting nothing amidst the wreckage of the years.

Carson McCullers
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.

Carson McCullers
I had never gone to a doctor in my adult life, feeling instinctively that doctors meant either cutting or, just as bad, diet.

Carson McCullers
We wander, question. But the answer waits in each separate heart — the answer of our own identity and the way by which we can master loneliness and feel that at last we belong.

Carson McCullers
Nothing is so musical as the sound of pouring bourbon for the first drink on a Sunday morning. Not Bach or Schubert or any of those masters.

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

Carson McCullers
Justice itself is a chimera, a delusion. Justice is not a flat yardstick, applied in equal measure to an equal situation.

Carson McCullers
There is no stillness like the quiet of the first cold nights in the fall.

Carson McCullers
The trouble with me is that for a long time I have just been an I person. All people belong to a We except me. Not to belong to a We makes you too lonesome.

Carson McCullers
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. I run these little pieces of myself through her and I come out complete. Now do you follow me?

Carson McCullers
This was the summer when for a long time she had not been a member. She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world. Frankie had become an unjoined person who hung around in the doorways, and she was afraid.

Carson McCullers
The seed of the idea is developed by both labor and the unconscious, and the struggle that goes on between them.

Carson McCullers
Three words were in the captain's heart. He shaped them soundlessly with his trembling lips, as he had not breath to spare for a whisper, 'I am lost.' And having given up life, the captain suddenly began to live.

Carson McCullers