Carson McCullers Quotes

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“The trouble with me is that for a long time I have just been anperson. All people belong to aexcept me. Not to belong to amakes you too lonesome.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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!”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“I´m a stranger in a strange land.”

“When a person knows and can't
make the others understand, what does he do?”

“All we can do is go around telling the truth.”

“If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are gone, either write things worth reading or do things worth writing.”

“I do not have any home. So why should I be homesick?”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Once you have lived with another, it is a great torture to have to live alone.”

“The whole world was this symphony, and there was not enough of her to listen.”

“They are the we of me.”

“My advice to you is this. Do not attempt to stand alone…. The most fatal thing a man can do is try to stand alone.”

“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 thinking mind is best controlled by the imagination.”

“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.”

“There was hope in him, and soon perhaps the outline of his journey would take form.”

“But all the time-no matter what she was doing-there was music.”

“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.”

“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.”

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