Carson McCullers famous quotes

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

#Dreamer #Conscious

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

#Lonely #Heart #Fire

Next to music beer was best.
-- Carson McCullers

#Music #Beer #Next

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

#Beautiful #Running #Soul

We are torn between nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.
-- Carson McCullers

#Travel #Homesick #Strange

Love is the bridge that leads from the I sense to the We, and there is a paradox about personal love. Love of another individual opens a new relation between the personality and the world. The lover responds in a new way to nature and may even write poetry. Love is affirmation; it motivates the yes responses and the sense of wider communication. Love casts out fear, and in the security of this togetherness we find contentment, courage. We no longer fear the age-old haunting questions: "Who am I?" "Why am I?" "Where am I going?" - and having cast out fear, we can be honest and charitable.
-- Carson McCullers

#Communication #Writing #Love Is

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

#Fall #People #House

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

#Freedom #Men #Trying

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

#Caring #Care

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

#Soul #Left Behind #Behinds

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

#Homesick #Nostalgia

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

#Loneliness #People #Essentials

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.
-- Carson McCullers

#People #Darkness #Tomorrow

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

#Writing

The mind is like a richly woven tapestry in which the colors are distilled from the experiences of the senses, and the design drawn from the convolutions of the intellect.
-- Carson McCullers

#Philosophy #Color #Medicine

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

#People #Giving #Might

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

#Courage #Humility #Imagination

the way i need you is a loneliness i cannot bear.
-- Carson McCullers

#Loneliness #Needs #Way

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

#Song #Book #Addresses

The thinking mind is best controlled by the imagination.
-- Carson McCullers

#Thinking #Imagination #Mind

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

#Lonely #Thinking #Differences

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

#God Knows

All we can do is go around telling the truth.
-- Carson McCullers

#Telling The Truth

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

#Jesus #Years #Two

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

#Without You #Meant To Be Alone #Meant To Be

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

#Doctors #Hands #Half

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

#Atheist #Heart #Afternoon

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

#Justice #Yardsticks #Chimera

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

#Manhattan #Brooklyn #Brilliant

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

#Cat #Climbing #Tree

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

#Dream #Art #Struggle

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

#Lonely #Thinking #Long

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.
-- Carson McCullers

#Writing #Doe #Tennessee

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

#Sunday #Afternoon #Sunday Afternoons

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

#Lonely #Religious #Heart

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

#Doctors #Use

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

#Long #People #Trouble

People, unless they are nilly-willy or very sick, cannot be taken into the hands and be changed overnight into somthing more worth-while and profitable.
-- Carson McCullers

#Taken #Hands #People

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

#Lonely #Men #Quality

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

#Home #Horror

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

#Country #Children #Men

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

#Wall #Jail #Bangs

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

#Morning #Sunday #Musical

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

#Past #Thinking #Sideways

Passion is more important than justice.
-- Carson McCullers

#Passion #Justice #Important

Death is the great gamer with a sleeve of tricks.
-- Carson McCullers

#Death #Gamer #Tricks

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

#Memories #Night #Space

I see a green tree. And to me it is green. And you would call the tree green also. And we would agree on this. But is the colour you see as green the same colour I see as green?
-- Carson McCullers

#Tree #Perception #Green

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

#Loneliness #Independent #Weather

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

#Mistake #Nails #Coffins

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

#Struggle #Ideas #Goes On

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

#Who You Are

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

#Hurt #Heart #Numbness

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.
-- Carson McCullers

#Children #Self #Littles

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

#Falling In Love #Love Is #World

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

#Squares #Roots #And Love

The writer must hew the phantom rock.
-- Carson McCullers

#Writing #Rocks #Phantoms

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.
-- Carson McCullers

#Lonely #Heart #Hunters

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

#Hero #Men #Giving

Jesus would be framed and in jail if he was living today.
-- Carson McCullers

#Jesus #Jail #Would Be

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

#Cutting #Doctors #Feelings

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

#Falling In Love #Men #Clouds

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

#Secret #Way #Truth Is

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

#Struggle #Character #Humility

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

#Hurt #Children #Heart

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

#Fighting #Hands #People

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

#Beautiful #Poison #Swamps

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

#Mean #Love Is #Two

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

#Fall #Night #Firsts

But no value has been put on human life; it is given to us free and taken without being paid for. What is it worth? If you look around, at times the value may seem to be little or nothing at all. Often after you have sweated and tried and things are not better for you, there comes a feeling deep down in the soul that you are not worth much.
-- Carson McCullers

#Taken #Soul #Feelings

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

#Torture

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

#Heart #Causes #Cold

I´m a stranger in a strange land.
-- Carson McCullers

#Land #Strange #Stranger

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

#Lonely #Powerful #Self

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

#Loneliness #Heart #Waiting

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

#Real #Thinking #Want

... and we are not alone in this slavery. there are millions of others throughout the world, of all colors and races and creeds. this we must remember. there are many of our people who hate the poor of the white race, and they hate us. the people in this town living by the river who work in the mills. people who are almost as much in need as we are ourselves. this hatred is a great evil, and no good can ever come from it... the injustice of need must bring us all together and not separate us. we must remember that we all make the things of this earth of value because of labor.
-- Carson McCullers

#Hate #Rivers #White

They are the we of me.
-- Carson McCullers

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

#Years #Trying #Together

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

#Matter

while time, the endless idiot, runs screaming around the world
-- Carson McCullers

#Running #Time #World

It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With Americans, it is a national trait, as native to us as the roller-coaster or the jukebox. It is no simple longing for the home town or country of our birth. The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.
-- Carson McCullers

#Country #Home #Simple

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

#Hurt #Real #Heart