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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 -
Death is the great gamer with a sleeve of tricks.
Carson McCullers
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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 -
Comparing the Brooklyn that I know with Manhattan is like comparing a comfortable and complacent duenna to her more brilliant and neurotic sister.
Carson McCullers -
The theme is the theme of humiliation, which is the square root of sin, as opposed to the freedom from humiliation, and love, which is the square root of wonderful.
Carson McCullers -
This was her, Mick Kelly, walking in the daytime and by herself at night. In the hot sun and in the dark with all the plans and feelings. This music was her—the real plain her...This music did not take a long time or a short time. It did not have anything to do with time going by at all. She sat with her arms around her legs, biting her salty knee very hard. The whole world was this symphony, and there was not enough of her to listen... Now that it was over there was only her heart beating like a rabbit and this terrible hurt.
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 -
The dimensions of a work of art are seldom realized by the author until the work is accomplished. It is like a flowering dream. Ideas grow, budding silently, and there are a thousand illuminations coming day by day as the work progresses. A seed grows in writing as in nature. The seed of the idea is developed by both labor and the unconscious, and the struggle that goes on between them.
Carson McCullers
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I think we look for the differences in people because it makes us less lonely.
Carson McCullers -
The world is certainty a sudden place.
Carson McCullers -
The thinking mind is best controlled by the imagination.
Carson McCullers -
Maybe when people longed for a thing that bad the longing made them trust in anything that might give it to them.
Carson McCullers -
Love is a joint experience between two persons -- but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved.
Carson McCullers -
I must go home periodically to renew my sense of horror.
Carson McCullers
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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.
Carson McCullers -
There is no stillness like the quiet of the first cold nights in the fall.
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 was like a cat always climbing the wrong tree.
Carson McCullers -
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.
Carson McCullers -
People felt themselves watching him even before they knew that there was anything different about him. His eyes made a person think that he heard things that no one else had ever heard, that he knew things no one had ever guessed before. He did not seem quite human.
Carson McCullers
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But you haven't never loved God nor even nair person. You hard and tough as cowhide. But just the same I knows you. This afternoon you going to roam all over the place without never being satisfied. You going to traipse all around like you haves to find something lost. You going to work yourself up with excitement. Your heart going to beat hard enough to kill you because you don't love and don't have peace. And then some day you going to bust loose and be ruined.
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 -
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.
Carson McCullers -
The most fatal thing a man can do is try to stand alone.
Carson McCullers