1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers Quotes

Carson McCullers was an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, essayist, and poet. Her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, explores the spiritual isolation of misfits and outcasts in a small town of the U.S. South. Her other novels have similar themes and most are set in the deep South.

McCullers’ oeuvre is often described as Southern Gothic and indicative of her southern roots. However, McCullers penned all of her work after leaving the South, and critics also describe her writing and eccentric characters as universal in scope. Her stories have been adapted to stage and film. A stagework of her novel The Member of the Wedding , which captures a young girl's feelings at her brother's wedding, made a successful Broadway run in 1950–51.

✵ 19. February 1917 – 29. September 1967  •  Other names کارسون مک‌کالرز, คาร์สัน แมคคัลเลอส์
Carson McCullers photo

Works

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
The Member of the Wedding
Carson McCullers: 45 quotes3 likes

Famous 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.”

Carson McCullers book The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

Source: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

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

Carson McCullers

Source: The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories

“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 book The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

Source: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

“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

Carson McCullers Quotes about people

“There are all these people here I don't know by sight or by name. And we pass alongside each other and don't have any connection. And they don't know me and I don't know them. And now I'm leaving town and there are all these people I will never know.”

Carson McCullers book The Member of the Wedding

Source: The Member of the Wedding

“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.”

Carson McCullers book The Member of the Wedding

Source: The Member of the Wedding

“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

Source: The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories

“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 book The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

Source: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

“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 book The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

Source: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

Carson McCullers Quotes about love

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

Carson McCullers

Source: The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories

“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

Source: The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories

“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 book The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

Source: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

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

Carson McCullers

Source: The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories

Carson McCullers Quotes

“Next to music, beer was best.”

Carson McCullers book The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

Source: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

“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 book The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

Variant: 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.
Source: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

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

Carson McCullers book The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

Source: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

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

Carson McCullers

Source: The Square Root of Wonderful

“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 book The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

Source: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

“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 book The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

Source: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

“I´m a stranger in a strange land.”

Carson McCullers book The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

Source: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

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

Carson McCullers book The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

Source: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

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

Carson McCullers

“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 book The Member of the Wedding

Source: The Member of the Wedding

“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

Source: The Mortgaged Heart: Selected Writings

“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.”

Carson McCullers book The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

Source: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

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

Carson McCullers

Source: The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories

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

Carson McCullers book The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

Source: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

“They are the we of me.”

Carson McCullers book The Member of the Wedding

Source: The Member of the Wedding

“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.”

Carson McCullers book The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

Source: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

“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 book The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

Source: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

“The thinking mind is best controlled by the imagination.”

Carson McCullers

Source: Illumination and Night Glare: The Unfinished Autobiography of 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 book The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

Source: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

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

Carson McCullers book The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

Source: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

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

Carson McCullers

Source: The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories

“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

“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 book The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

Source: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

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

Carson McCullers book The Member of the Wedding

Source: The Member of the Wedding

Similar authors

Frank Herbert photo
Frank Herbert158
American writer None
William Saroyan photo
William Saroyan190
American writer None
Ray Bradbury photo
Ray Bradbury401
American writer None
William Faulkner photo
William Faulkner214
American writer None
Julio Cortázar photo
Julio Cortázar29
Argentinian writer None
David Foster Wallace photo
David Foster Wallace185
American fiction writer and essayist None
Pearl S. Buck photo
Pearl S. Buck95
American writer None
Charles Bukowski photo
Charles Bukowski555
American writer None
Joseph Campbell photo
Joseph Campbell140
American mythologist, writer and lecturer None
Dale Carnegie photo
Dale Carnegie98
American writer and lecturer None