Carson McCullers Quotes

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

The thinking mind is best controlled by the imagination.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

I´m a stranger in a strange land.

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

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

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

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.

Next to music beer was best.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Writing, for me, is a search for God.

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

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

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

Imagination takes humility, love and great courage.

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

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

All we can do is go around telling the truth.

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.

The writer must hew the phantom rock.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Resentment is the most precious flower of poverty.

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

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.

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

Coming down was the hardest part of any climbing.

Death is the great gamer with a sleeve of tricks.

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

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?

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