Carson McCullers quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Carson McCullers on Wise Famous Quotes.

I wish I was somebody else except me.

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

The old bitterness came up in him and he did not have time to cogitate and push it down.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

They are the we of me.

And now, as a summer flower shatters in September ,it was finished.

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

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

The eyes of his friend were moist and dark, and in them he saw the little rectangled pictures of himself that he had watched a thousand times.

German lieder is creepy music. That's why I specialize in it.

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

She had always kept things to herself. That was one sure truth.

Next to music, beer was best.

Each day was very much like any other day, because they were alone so much that nothing ever disturbed them.

He was thinking that in nearly every person there was some special physical part kept always guarded.

Comparing the Brooklyn that I know with Manhattan is like comparing a comfortable and complacent duenna to her more brilliant and neurotic sister.

In her heart it didn't give her near the same feeling that music did. Nothing was really as good as music.

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

The closest thing to being cared for is to care for someone else.

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

Resentment is the most precious flower of poverty.

A fellow can't live without giving his passive acceptance to meanness.

The world is certainty a sudden place.

Why did he go onward? Why did he not rest here upon the bottom of utmost humiliation and for a while take his content?
But he went onward.

The value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself.

Coming down was the hardest part of any climbing.

We are homesick most for the places we have never known.

All we can do is go around telling the truth.

To know who you are, you have to have a place to come from.

If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are gone, either write things worth reading or do things worth writing.

Mick had heard Portia say that
before, but she had thought it was a
tale. How could a colored man be a
doctor?

The human heart is a lonely hunter-but the search for us southerners is more anguished ...

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

He could not understand the wild quiver of his heart, nor the following sense of recklessness and grace that lingered after she was gone.

I have more to say than Hemingway, and God knows, I say it better than Faulkner.

Love is the main generator of all good writing ... Love, passion, compassion, are all welded together.

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

I must go home periodically to renew my sense of horror.

The most fatal thing a man can do is try to stand alone.

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

Because of the insolence of all the white race he was afraid to lose his dignity in friendliness.

What did he understand? Nothing. Where was he headed? Nowhere. What did he want? To know. What? A meaning. Why? A riddle.

Once you have lived with another, it is a great torture to have to live alone.

Sunday afternoons are the longest afternoons of all ...

In one of their quarrels, they had begun calling each other Mister. and Misses., and since then they had never made it up enough to change it.

Writing, for me, is a search for God.

The whole world was this symphony, and there was not enough of her to listen.

The way i need you is a loneliness i cannot bear.

The warring love and hatred
love for his people and hatred for the oppressors of his people
that left him exhausted and sick in spirit.

And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being loved is intolerable to many.

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.

He was like a man who had served a term in prison or had been to Harvard College or had lived for a long time with foreigners in South America.

The mutual distrust between the men who were just awakened and those who were ending a long night gave everyone a feeling of estrangement.

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

Were trying to dig up the roots of that big oak stump near the

Maybe when people longed for a thing that bad the longing made them trust in anything that might give it to them.

There was a hollow in her chest, but at the bottom of this emptiness a heavy weight pressed down and bruised her stomach, so that she felt sick.

The world that jibes your tenderness / Jails your lust.

He nearly always put his hand on his friend's arm and looked for a second into his face before leaving him.

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.

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

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

There was hope in him, and soon perhaps the outline of his journey would take form.

The thinking mind is best controlled by the imagination.

With her it was like there was two places - the inside room and the outside room.

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

Don't you loathe it when doctors use the word 'we' when it applies only and solely to yourself?

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

Death is the great gamer with a sleeve of tricks.

Leonora Penderton feared neither man, beast, nor the devil; God she had never known.

I think we look for the differences in people because it makes us less lonely.

While time, the endless idiot, runs screaming around the world

There was none of the quiet insolence about this man.

Us going to have a cup of coffee. Then maybe it all won't seem so bad.

It was almost three o'clock, the most stagnant hour in the day or night.

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

I am not meant to be alone and without you who understands.

I do not have any home. So why should I be homesick?

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

The writer must hew the phantom rock.

The writer is by nature a dreamer - a conscious dreamer.

Some men are heroes by nature in that they will give all that is in them without regard to the effort or to the personal returns.

The love she felt was so hard that she had to squeeze him to her until her arms were tired.

In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together.

Imagination takes humility, love and great courage.

Passion is more important than justice.

Frances wanted the whole world to die.

They start at the wrong end of love. They begin at the climax. Can you wonder why it is so miserable?

Jake had begun to carry chalk in his pockets, also. He wrote brief sentences. He tried to word them so that a man would think.

It is music that causes the heart to broaden and the listener to grow cold with ecstasy and fright.

You mind Ralph," she called back to Bubber. "Mind the gnats don't sit on his eyelids.

Then when he had washed the ashtray and the glass he brought out a pistol from his pocket and put a bullet in his chest.

A person can't pick up they children and just squeeze them to which-a-way they wants them to be.

It was like she was so empty there wasn't even a feeling or thought in her.

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.

I was like a cat always climbing the wrong tree.

She did not know why she was sad, but because of this peculiar sadness, she began to realize she ought to leave the town.

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

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

He had a few eccentricities himself and was tolerant of the peculiarities of others; indeed, he rather relished the ridiculous.