Carson McCullers Quotes
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How can the dead be truly dead when they still live in the souls of those who are left behind?
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The closest thing to being cared for is to care for someone else.
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There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries.
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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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But the hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes.
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The writer by nature of his profession is a dreamer and a conscious dreamer. He must imagine, and imagination takes humility, love and great courage. How can you create a character without live and the struggle that goes with love?
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The writer is by nature a dreamer - a conscious dreamer.
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I was like a cat always climbing the wrong tree.
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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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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.
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I meditated on love and reasoned it out. I realized what is wrong with us. Men fall in love for the first time. And what do they fall in love with? ...They fall in love with a woman. They start at the wrong end of love. They begin at the climax. Can you wonder it is so miserable? Do you know how men should love? A tree. A rock. A cloud.
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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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justice itself is a chimera, a delusion. Justice is not a flat yardstick, applied in equal measure to an equal situation.
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For you see, when us people who know run into each other that's an event. It almost never happens. Sometimes we meet each other and neither guesses that the other is one who knows. That's a bad thing. It's happened to me a lot of times. But you see there are so few of us.
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For in a swift radiance of illumination he saw a glimpse of human struggle and valor. Of the endless fluid passage of the humanity through endless time. And of those who labor and of those who - one word- love. His soul expanded. But for a moment only. For in him, he felt a warning, a shaft of terror.
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In the face of brutality I was prudent. Before injustice I held my peace. I sacrificed the things in hand for the good of the hypothetical whole. I believed in the tongue instead of the fist. As an armor against oppression I taught patience and faith in the human soul. I know now how wrong I was. I have been a traitor to myself and to my people. All that is rot.
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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. I run these little pieces of myself through her and I come out complete. Now do you follow me?
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The people dreamed and fought and slept as much as ever. And by habit they shortened their thoughts so that they would not wander out into the darkness beyond tomorrow.
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This fear is one of the horrors of an author's life. Where does work come from? What chance, what small episode will start the chain of creation? I once wrote a story about a writer who could not write anymore, and my friend Tennessee Williams said, 'How could you dare write that story, it's the most frightening work I have ever read.' I was pretty well sunk while I was writing it.
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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.
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I think we look for the differences in people because it makes us less lonely.
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Day and night she had drudged and struggled and thrown her soul into her work, and there was not much of her left over for anything else. 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. Through the lies, she lived vicariously. The lies doubled the little of her existence that was left over from work and augmented the little rag end of her personal life.
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I must go home periodically to renew my sense of horror.
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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.