Top 100 Carson McCullers Quotes
#1. Maybe when people longed for a thing that bad the longing made them trust in anything that might give it to them.
Carson McCullers
#2. The loneliness in him was so keen that he was filled with terror. Usually he had a pint of bootleg white lightning. He drank the raw liquor and by daylight he was warm and relaxed.
Carson McCullers
#3. And why did everyone persist in thinking the mute was exactly as they wanted him to be
when most likely it was all a very queer mistake? ... In the battling tumult of voices he alone was silent.
Carson McCullers
#4. 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
#6. That was the best of all. To speak the truth and be attended.
Carson McCullers
#7. I got to wear blinders all the time so I won't think sideways or in the past.
Carson McCullers
#8. 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.
Carson McCullers
#9. The value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself.
Carson McCullers
#10. It is music that causes the heart to broaden and the listener to grow cold with ecstasy and fright.
Carson McCullers
#11. And now, as a summer flower shatters in September ,it was finished.
Carson McCullers
#12. The human heart is a lonely hunter-but the search for us southerners is more anguished ...
Carson McCullers
#13. Each day was very much like any other day, because they were alone so much that nothing ever disturbed them.
Carson McCullers
#14. Leonora Penderton feared neither man, beast, nor the devil; God she had never known.
Carson McCullers
#15. 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
#16. Then when he had washed the ashtray and the glass he brought out a pistol from his pocket and put a bullet in his chest.
Carson McCullers
#18. After such mornings he returned to the show with relief. It eased him to push through the crowds of people. The noise, the rank stinks, the shouldering contact of human flesh soothed his jangled nerves.
Carson McCullers
#19. He had a few eccentricities himself and was tolerant of the peculiarities of others; indeed, he rather relished the ridiculous.
Carson McCullers
#20. 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 to religion. All his troubles come down just to that.
Carson McCullers
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. In one of their quarrels, they had begun calling each other Mister. and Misses., and since then they had never made it up enough to change it.
Carson McCullers
#24. The writer by nature of his profession is a dreamer and a conscious dreamer. He must imagine, and imagination takes humility, love and great courage. How can you create a character without live and the struggle that goes with love?
Carson McCullers
#25. A person can't pick up they children and just squeeze them to which-a-way they wants them to be.
Carson McCullers
#26. He could not understand the wild quiver of his heart, nor the following sense of recklessness and grace that lingered after she was gone.
Carson McCullers
#27. It was the year Frankie thought about the world. And she did not see it as a round school globe, with the countries neat and different-colored. She thought of the world as huge and cracked and loose
and turning a thousand miles an hour.
Carson McCullers
#28. 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
#29. What good was it? That was the question she would like to know. What the hell good was it. All the plans she had made, and the music. When all that came of it was this trap
the store, then home to sleep, and back at the store again.
Carson McCullers
#30. To me it is the irony of fate," she said. "The way they come here. Those moths could fly anywhere. Yet they keep hanging around the windows of this house.
Carson McCullers
#31. He was thinking that in nearly every person there was some special physical part kept always guarded.
Carson McCullers
#32. 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. They have to.
Carson McCullers
#34. 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
#36. 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.
Carson McCullers
#37. 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
#38. To know who you are, you have to have a place to come from.
Carson McCullers
#40. Falling in love is the easiest thing in the world. It's standing in love that matters.
Carson McCullers
#41. Man does not make these natural resources
man only develops them, only uses them for work ... How can a man own ground and space and sunlight and rain for crops?
Carson McCullers
#42. 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
#43. Comparing the Brooklyn that I know with Manhattan is like comparing a comfortable and complacent duenna to her more brilliant and neurotic sister.
Carson McCullers
#45. The whole world was this symphony, and there was not enough of her to listen.
Carson McCullers
#46. Don't you loathe it when doctors use the word 'we' when it applies only and solely to yourself?
Carson McCullers
#47. 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
#48. The warring love and hatred
love for his people and hatred for the oppressors of his people
that left him exhausted and sick in spirit.
Carson McCullers
#49. 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
#50. The job wouldn't be just put the summer, but for a long time, as long as she could see ahead. Once they were used to the money coming in it would be impossible to do without again.
Carson McCullers
#51. You think out everything in your brain. While us rather talk from something in our hearts that has been there for a long time. That's one of them differences.
Carson McCullers
#52. German lieder is creepy music. That's why I specialize in it.
Carson McCullers
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. His own life seemed so solitary, a fragile column supporting nothing amidst the wreckage of the years.
Carson McCullers
#62. 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
#63. It was like she was so empty there wasn't even a feeling or thought in her.
Carson McCullers
#64. Owing to the fact he was a mute they were able to give him all the qualities they wanted him to have.
Carson McCullers
#65. I have never gone to a doctor in my adult life, feeling instinctively that doctors meant either cutting or, just as bad, diet.
Carson McCullers
#66. But all the time-no matter what she was doing-there was music.
Carson McCullers
#67. 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
#68. You don't know what it is to store up a lot of details and then come upon something real.
Carson McCullers
#69. You mind Ralph," she called back to Bubber. "Mind the gnats don't sit on his eyelids.
Carson McCullers
#70. The theme is the theme of humiliation, which is the square root of sin, as opposed to the freedom from humiliation, and love, which is the square root of wonderful.
Carson McCullers
#71. Why did he go onward? Why did he not rest here upon the bottom of utmost humiliation and for a while take his content?
But he went onward.
Carson McCullers
#73. The love she felt was so hard that she had to squeeze him to her until her arms were tired.
Carson McCullers
#74. 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
#75. But no value has been put on human life; it is given to us free and taken without being paid for. What is it worth? If you look around, at times the value may seem to be little or nothing at all.
Carson McCullers
#76. To the lost, transfixed among the self-inflicted ruins,
All that is non-air (if this indeed is not deception)
Is agony immobilized. While Time,
The endless idiot, runs screaming round the world.
Carson McCullers
#77. In her heart it didn't give her near the same feeling that music did. Nothing was really as good as music.
Carson McCullers
#78. 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
#79. Sometimes he thought that he had talked so much in the years before to his children and they had understood so little that now there was nothing at all to say.
Carson McCullers
#80. Because of the insolence of all the white race he was afraid to lose his dignity in friendliness.
Carson McCullers
#81. While time, the endless idiot, runs screaming around the world
Carson McCullers
#82. Mick had heard Portia say that
before, but she had thought it was a
tale. How could a colored man be a
doctor?
Carson McCullers
#83. 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
#84. The mutual distrust between the men who were just awakened and those who were ending a long night gave everyone a feeling of estrangement.
Carson McCullers
#85. He felt as though he had swelled up to the size of a giant. The love in him made his chest a dynamo, and he wanted to shout so that his voice could be heard throughout the town. He wanted to fall upon the floor and call out in a giant voice.
Carson McCullers
#86. She had always kept things to herself. That was one sure truth.
Carson McCullers
#88. The old bitterness came up in him and he did not have time to cogitate and push it down.
Carson McCullers
#89. During these weeks there was a quality about Miss Amelia that many people noticed. She laughed often, with a deep ringing laugh, and her whistling had a sassy, tunefull trickery. She was forever trying out her strength, lifting up heavy objects or poking her tough biceps with her finger.
Carson McCullers
#91. It was better to be in a jail where you could bang the walls than in a jail you could not see.
Carson McCullers
#92. With her it was like there was two places - the inside room and the outside room.
Carson McCullers
#93. There was hope in him, and soon perhaps the outline of his journey would take form.
Carson McCullers
#94. 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
#95. They start at the wrong end of love. They begin at the climax. Can you wonder why it is so miserable?
Carson McCullers
#96. Love is the main generator of all good writing ... Love, passion, compassion, are all welded together.
Carson McCullers
#98. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries.
Carson McCullers
#99. Jake had begun to carry chalk in his pockets, also. He wrote brief sentences. He tried to word them so that a man would think.
Carson McCullers
#100. He nearly always put his hand on his friend's arm and looked for a second into his face before leaving him.
Carson McCullers
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