Famous Quotes & Sayings

Carson McCullers Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 100 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Carson McCullers.

Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Google+ Pinterest Share on Linkedin

Famous Quotes By Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers Quotes 139911

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

Carson McCullers Quotes 765572

I was like a cat always climbing the wrong tree. — Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers Quotes 331898

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

Carson McCullers Quotes 693878

Doctor Copeland belt old evil anger in him. The words rose inchoately to his throat and he could not speak them. They would listen to the old man. Yet to word the reason they will not attend. — Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers Quotes 391519

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

Carson McCullers Quotes 1900261

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

Carson McCullers Quotes 1131855

You mean,' Captain Penderton said, 'that any fulfilment obtained at the expense of normalcy is wrong, and should not be allowed to bring happiness. In short, it is better, because it is morally honourable, for the square peg to keep scraping around the round hole rather than to discover and use the unorthodox square that would fit?' ... 'I don't agree — Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers Quotes 1160680

Man does not make these natural resources
man only develops them, only uses them for work ... How can a man own ground and space and sunlight and rain for crops? — Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers Quotes 2158525

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

Carson McCullers Quotes 584522

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

Carson McCullers Quotes 1173055

To the lost, transfixed among the self-inflicted ruins,
All that is non-air (if this indeed is not deception)
Is agony immobilized. While Time,
The endless idiot, runs screaming round the world. — Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers Quotes 1826361

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

Carson McCullers Quotes 2267685

But say a man does know. He sees the world as it is and he looks back thousands of years to see how it all came about. He watches the slow agglutination of capital and power and he sees its pinnacle today. He sees America as a crazy house. He sees how men have to rob their brothers in order to live. He sees children starving and women working sixty hours a week to get to eat. He sees a whole damn army of unemployed and billions of dollars and thousands of miles of land wasted. He sees war coming. He sees when people suffer just so much they get mean and ugly and something dies in them. But the main thing he sees is that the whole system of the world is built on a lie. And although it's as plain as the shining sun - the don't-knows have lived with that lie so long they just can't see it. — Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers Quotes 1627116

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

Carson McCullers Quotes 1040101

But the music did not come again. The tune was left broken, unfinished. And the drawn tightness she could no longer stand. She felt she must do something wild and sudden that never had been done before. She hit herself on the head with her fist, but that did not help any at all. And she began to talk aloud, although at first she paid no attention to her own words and did not know in advance what she would say. — Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers Quotes 334147

It was a small of her back and her face that got so tired. Their (her retail employer's) mono was supposed to be, 'Keep on your toes and smile.' Once she was out of the store she had to frown a long time to get her face natural again. Even her ears were tired. — Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers Quotes 2059994

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. — Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers Quotes 1575478

A person's got to fight for every single thing they get,' she said slowly. 'And I've noticed a lot of times that the farther down a kid comes in the family the better the kid really is. — Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers Quotes 798446

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? — Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers Quotes 1265151

The things they have done to us! The truths they have turned into lies! The ideals they have fouled and made vile. Take Jesus. He was one of us. He knew. When He said that it is harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God - He damn well meant just what He said. But look at what the church has done to Jesus in the last two thousand years. What they have made of Him. How they have turned every word he spoke for their own vile ends. Jesus would be framed and in jail if He was living today. Jesus would be one who really knows. Me and Jesus would sit across the table and I would look at Him and He would look at me and we would both know that the other knew. Me and Jesus and Karl Marx could all sit at a table and - — Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers Quotes 1349477

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

Carson McCullers Quotes 1267321

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

Carson McCullers Quotes 1343818

She was at the age when she looked as much like an overgrown boy as a girl. And on that subject why was it that the smartest people mostly missed that point? By nature all people are of both sexes. So that marriage and the bed is not all by any means. The proof? Real youth and old age. Because often old men's voices grow high and reedy and the take on a mincing walk. And old women sometimes grow fat and their voices get rough and deep and the grow dark little mustaches. — Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers Quotes 1386299

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

Carson McCullers Quotes 1388216

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

Carson McCullers Quotes 1395798

Writing, for me, is a search for God. — Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers Quotes 1138286

Listen," F. Jasmine said. "What I've been trying to say is this. Doesn't it strike you as strange that I am I, and you are you? I am F. Jasmine Addams. And you are Berenice Sadie Brown. And we can look at each other, and touch each other, and stay together year in and year out in the same room. Yet always I am I, and you are you. And I can't ever be anything else but me, and you can ever be anything else but you. Have you ever thought of that? And does it seem to you strange? — Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers Quotes 1399945

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

Carson McCullers Quotes 1401894

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

Carson McCullers Quotes 1341217

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

Carson McCullers Quotes 1442177

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

Carson McCullers Quotes 1241337

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

Carson McCullers Quotes 1531463

Frances wanted the whole world to die. — Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers Quotes 1331756

Next to music, beer was best. — Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers Quotes 1329425

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

Carson McCullers Quotes 1897541

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. — Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers Quotes 2253667

Then at last the opening music came again, with all the different instruments bunched together for each note like a hard, tight fist that socked at her heart. And the first part was over. 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 held tight around her legs, biting her salty knee very hard. It might have been five minutes she listened or half the night. The second part was black-colored
a slow march. Not sad, but like the whole world was dead and black and there was no use thinking back how it was before. One of those horn kind of insturments played a sad and silver tune. Then the music rose up angry and with excitement underneath. And finally the black march again. — Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers Quotes 2234424

Imagination takes humility, love and great courage. — Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers Quotes 2213837

Southerners are the more lonely and spiritually estranged, I think, because we have lived so long in an artificial social system that we insisted was natural and right and just - when all along we knew it wasn't. — Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers Quotes 2197811

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

Carson McCullers Quotes 2109479

There was none of the quiet insolence about this man. — Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers Quotes 2048487

She was afraid of these things that made her suddenly wonder who she was, and what she was going to be in the world, and why she was standing at that minute, seeing a light, or listening, or staring up into the sky: alone. — Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers Quotes 2036070

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

Carson McCullers Quotes 1934117

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

Carson McCullers Quotes 1917486

He felt as though he had swelled up to the size of a giant. The love in him made his chest a dynamo, and he wanted to shout so that his voice could be heard throughout the town. He wanted to fall upon the floor and call out in a giant voice. — Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers Quotes 1915322

The loneliness in him was so keen that he was filled with terror. Usually he had a pint of bootleg white lightning. He drank the raw liquor and by daylight he was warm and relaxed. — Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers Quotes 1560314

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

Carson McCullers Quotes 1854889

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

Carson McCullers Quotes 1807204

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

Carson McCullers Quotes 1739264

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

Carson McCullers Quotes 1730574

Sometimes this fellow's music was like little colored pieces of crystal candy, and other times it was the softest, saddest thing she had ever imagined about. — Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers Quotes 1694775

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. — Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers Quotes 1682317

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

Carson McCullers Quotes 1674812

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. — Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers Quotes 1601954

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

Carson McCullers Quotes 1601744

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

Carson McCullers Quotes 370391

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

Carson McCullers Quotes 690253

Any form of art can only develop by means of single mutations by individual creators. If only traditional conventions are used an art will die, and the widening of an art form is bound to seem strange at first, and awkward. Any growing thing must go through awkward stages. The creator who is misunderstood because of his breach of convention may say to himself, 'I seem strange to you, but anyway I am alive. — Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers Quotes 663166

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

Carson McCullers Quotes 644686

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

Carson McCullers Quotes 636067

Today we are not put up on the platforms and sold at the courthouse square. But we are forced to sell our strength, our time, our souls during almost every hour that we live. We have been freed from one kind of slavery only to be delivered into another. Is this freedom? — Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers Quotes 548981

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. — Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers Quotes 538608

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

Carson McCullers Quotes 532390

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

Carson McCullers Quotes 483119

What are the sources of an illumination? To me, they come after hours of searching and keeping my soul ready. Yet they come in a flash, as a religious phenomenon. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter had such an illumination, beginning my long search for the truth of the story and flashing light into the long two years ahead. — Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers Quotes 427071

By the moonlight he watched his wife for the last time. His hand sought the adjacent flesh and sorrow paralleled desire in the immense complexity of love. — Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers Quotes 415042

The writer is by nature a dreamer - a conscious dreamer. — Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers Quotes 721527

We all of us somehow caught. We born this way or that way and we don't know why. But we caught any how. I was born Berenice. You Born Franky. John Henry born John Henry. And maybe we wants to widen and bust free. But no matter what we do we still caught. Me is me and you is you and he is he. We each one of us somehow caught all by ourself. I'm caught worse than you is. Because I'm Black, because I'm colored. — Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers Quotes 342768

The Heart is a lonely hunter with only one desire! To find some lasting comfort in the arms of anothers fire ... driven by a desperate hunger to the arms of a neon light, the heart is a lonely hunter when there's no sign of love in sight! — Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers Quotes 326267

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. — Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers Quotes 295767

In the face of brutality I was prudent. Before injustice I held my peace. I sacrificed the things in hand for the good of they 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 not. Now is the time to act and to act quickly. Fight cunning with cunning and might with might — Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers Quotes 294184

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

Carson McCullers Quotes 282691

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. — Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers Quotes 264578

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

Carson McCullers Quotes 248858

But look what the Church has done to Jesus during the last two thousand years. What they have made of Him. How they have turned every word He spoke for their own vile ends. Jesus would be framed and in jail if he was living today. — Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers Quotes 230757

What good was it? That was the question she would like to know. What the hell good was it. All the plans she had made, and the music. When all that came of it was this trap
the store, then home to sleep, and back at the store again. — Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers Quotes 218314

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

Carson McCullers Quotes 162227

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

Carson McCullers Quotes 902666

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

Carson McCullers Quotes 1213557

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

Carson McCullers Quotes 1210810

The way i need you is a loneliness i cannot bear. — Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers Quotes 1148577

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. — Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers Quotes 1126084

It was the year Frankie thought about the world. And she did not see it as a round school globe, with the countries neat and different-colored. She thought of the world as huge and cracked and loose
and turning a thousand miles an hour. — Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers Quotes 1119278

The silence in the room was deep as the night itself. Biff stood transfixed, lost in his meditations. Then suddenly he felt a quickening in him. His heart turned and he leaned his back against the counter for support. For in a swift radiance of illumination he saw a glimpse of human struggle and of valour. Of the endless fluid passage of humanity through endless time. And of those who labour 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. Between the two worlds he was suspended ... suspended between radiance and darkness, between bitter irony and faith ... And would he just stand here like a jittery nanny or would he pull himself together and be reasonable? For after all was he a sensible man or was he not? — Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers Quotes 1070139

He waited for the black, terrible anger as though for some beast out of the night. But it did not come to him. His bowels seemed weighted with lead, and he walked slowly and lingered against fences and the cold, wet walls of buildings by the way. Descent into the depths until at last there was no further chasm below. He touched the solid bottom of despair and there took ease. — Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers Quotes 1067606

She spoke and he could not understand. The sounds were distinct in his ear but they had no shape or meaning. It was as though his head were the prow of a boat and the sounds were water that broke on him and then flowed past. He felt he had to look behind to find the words already said. — Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers Quotes 1047591

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

Carson McCullers Quotes 1037756

There are times when a man's greatest need is to have someone to love, some focal point for his diffused emotions. Also there are times when the irritations, disappointments, and fears of life, restless as spermatozoids, must be released in hate. — Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers Quotes 917436

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

Carson McCullers Quotes 1229958

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

Carson McCullers Quotes 881159

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

Carson McCullers Quotes 870379

He did not wholly understand the intricate play of ideas and the complex phrases, but as he read he sensed a strong, who purpose behind the words and he felt that he almost understood. — Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers Quotes 866132

It happened that green and crazy summer when Frankie was twelve years old. 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 and hung around in doorways, and she was afraid. — Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers Quotes 850794

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

Carson McCullers Quotes 839328

Now hoppin'-john was F. Jasmine's very favorite food. She had always warned them to wave a plate of rice and peas before her nose when she was in her coffin, to make certain there was no mistake; for if a breath of life was left in her, she would sit up and eat, but if she smelled the hopping-john, and did not stir, then they could just nail down the coffin and be certain she was truly dead. — Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers Quotes 795484

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

Carson McCullers Quotes 770925

She decided to donate blood to the Red Cross; she wanted to donate a quart a week and her blood would be in the veins of Australians and Fighting French and Chinese, all over the whole world, and it would be as though she were close kin to all of these people. She could hear the army doctors saying that the blood of Frankie Addams was the reddest and the strongest blood that they had ever known. — Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers Quotes 760608

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

Carson McCullers Quotes 751921

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. — Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers Quotes 726265

Why? Why was it that in cases of real love the one who is left does not more often follow the beloved by suicide? Only because the living must bury the dead? Because of the measured rites that must be fulfilled after a death? Because it is as though the one who is left steps for a time upon a stage and each second swells to an unlimited amount of time and he id watched by many eyes? Because there is a function he must carry out? Or perhaps, when there is love, the widowed must stay for the resurrection of the beloved - so that the one who has gone is not really dead, but grows and is created for a second time in the soul of the living? Why? — Carson McCullers