Carson Mccullers Quotes

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

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

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

~ 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

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

Blount sat down to the table and leaned over close to Singer. 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. It's like in the fifteenth century when everybody believed the world was flat and only Columbus and a few other fellows knew the truth. But it's different in that it took talent to figure that the earth is round. While the truth is so obvious it's a miracle of all history that people don't know.

~ Carson Mccullers

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

~ Carson Mccullers

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

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

~ Carson Mccullers

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

It was like that kid had been born knowing how to read. He was only in the second grade but he loved to read stories by himself - and he never asked anybody else to read to him.

~ Carson Mccullers

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

They are the we of me.

~ Carson Mccullers

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

Next to music, beer was best.

~ Carson Mccullers

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

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

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

The thinking mind is best controlled by the imagination.

~ Carson Mccullers

That was all he wanted for himself – to give to her. Biff's mouth hardened. He had done nothing wrong but in him he felt a strange guilt. Why? The dark guilt in all men, unreckoned and without a name.

~ Carson Mccullers

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

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

~ Carson Mccullers

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

~ Carson Mccullers

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.

~ Carson Mccullers

The way I need you is a loneliness I cannot bear

~ Carson Mccullers

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

It was as though his son cheated him by depriving him of his beloved presence, the sweet and treacherous thief had plundered his heart. If Johnny had died in any other way, cancer or leukaemia… he could have grieved with a clear heart, cried also. But suicide seemed a deliberate act of spite which the Judge resented.

~ Carson Mccullers

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

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

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

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

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

~ Carson Mccullers

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

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

Wonderful music like this was the worst hurt there could be. The whole world was the symphony, and there was not enough of her to listen.

~ Carson Mccullers

I feels sorrier for him than anybody I knows. I expect he done read more books than any white man in this town. He done read more books and he done worried about more things. He full of books and worrying. He done lost God and turned his back on religion. His troubles come down just to that.

~ Carson Mccullers

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

~ Carson Mccullers

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

~ Carson Mccullers

There was another thing bigger than the tiredness – and this was the strong crew purpose.

~ Carson Mccullers

Because of the insolence of all the white race he was afraid to lose his dignity in friendliness.

~ Carson Mccullers