Carson McCullers Quotes

Quotes about:

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  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, Jukebox, Road Trip

  Carson McCullers (2017). “Carson McCullers: Stories, Plays & Other Writings”, p.408, Library of America

  89 Copy quote

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

  Carson McCullers

  Falling In Love, Love Is, Matter

  Carson McCullers (1961). “Clock without hands”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  49 Copy quote

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

  Carson McCullers

  Knows, Who You Are

  16 Copy quote

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

  Carson McCullers

  Soul, Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, Left Behind

  Carson McCullers (2004). “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter”, p.333, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  49 Copy quote

• All we can do is go around telling the truth.

  Carson McCullers

  Telling The Truth, Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, Can Do

  Carson McCullers (2010). “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter”, p.159, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  75 Copy quote

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

  Carson McCullers

  Dreamer, Conscious

  60 Copy quote

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

  Carson McCullers

  Home, Horror

  Carson McCullers (1998). “Collected Stories of Carson McCullers”, p.8, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  8 Copy quote

• The thinking mind is best controlled by the imagination.

  Carson McCullers

  Thinking, Imagination, Mind

  Carson McCullers (2005). “The Mortgaged Heart: Selected Writings”, p.277, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  33 Copy quote

• 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

  20 Copy quote

• For fear is a primary source of evil. And when the question "Who am I?" recurs and is unanswered, then fear and frustration project a negative attitude. The bewildered soul can answer only: "Since I do not understand 'Who I am,' I only know what I am not." The corollary of this emotional incertitude is snobbism, intolerance and racial hate. The xenophobic individual can only reject and destroy, as the xenophobic nation inevitably makes war.

  Carson McCullers

  Attitude, Hate, War

  46 Copy quote

• 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

  49 Copy quote

• Resentment is the most precious flower of poverty.

  Carson McCullers

  Flower, Poverty, Resentment

  Carson McCullers (2010). “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter”, p.64, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  7 Copy quote
• 

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

  Carson McCullers

  Jukebox, Homesick, Nostalgia

  Carson McCullers (2017). “Carson McCullers: Stories, Plays & Other Writings”, p.408, Library of America

  73 Copy quote

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

  Carson McCullers

  Fall, Night, Firsts

  Carson McCullers (2005). “The Ballad of the Sad Cafe”, p.44, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe" (1943)

  35 Copy quote

• 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

  Carson McCullers (1998). “Collected Stories of Carson McCullers”, p.405, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  12 Copy quote

• 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

  30 Copy quote

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

  Carson McCullers

  Caring, Care, Closest

  Carson McCullers (2017). “Carson McCullers: Stories, Plays & Other Writings”, p.310, Library of America

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Carson McCullers (2010). “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter”, p.52, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  8 Copy quote

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

  Carson McCullers

  Freedom, Men, Trying

  Carson McCullers (2010). “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter”, p.302, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Carson McCullers (1964). “The ballad of the sad café”

  33 Copy quote

• 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

  Carson McCullers (1975). “The mortgaged heart”, Penguin Books Ltd

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Carson McCullers (1998). “Clock Without Hands”, p.23, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  61 Copy quote

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

  Carson McCullers

  God Knows, Knows

  11 Copy quote

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