Top 100 Mccullers Quotes
#1. This minute is passing. And it will never come again. Never in all the world. When it is gone, it is gone. No power on earth could bring it back again. - Carson McCullers
Peg Kehret
#2. As for the writers who have influenced me they are many. Hemingway, Chandler, Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, William Goldman, Flannery O'Conner, Carson McCullers, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and so many others. As a kid Kipling and Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Robert E. Howard.
Joe R. Lansdale
#3. I understood that my family was rich in love but would probably never own the land my father, John, dreamed of owning. My mother, Willie Ella Mays Clarke, was a washerwoman for poor white folks in the area of Columbus, Georgia where the writer Carson McCullers once lived.
John Henrik Clarke
#4. Maybe when people longed for a thing that bad the longing made them trust in anything that might give it to them.
Carson McCullers
#5. Justice itself is a chimera, a delusion. Justice is not a flat yardstick, applied in equal measure to an equal situation.
Carson McCullers
#6. 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
#8. 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
#9. It happened that green and crazy summer when Frankie was twelve years old. This was the summer when for a long time she had not been a member. She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world. Frankie had become an unjoined person and hung around in doorways, and she was afraid.
Carson McCullers
#11. 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
#12. 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
#14. 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
#15. That was the best of all. To speak the truth and be attended.
Carson McCullers
#16. All men are lonely. But sometimes it seems to me that we Americans are the loneliest of all. Our hunger for foreign places and new ways has been with us almost like a national disease. Our literature is stamped with a quality of longing and unrest, and our writers have been great wanderers.
Carson McCullers
#17. I got to wear blinders all the time so I won't think sideways or in the past.
Carson McCullers
#18. I have more to say than Hemingway, and God knows, I say it better than Faulkner.
Carson McCullers
#19. People, unless they are nilly-willy or very sick, cannot be taken into the hands and be changed overnight into somthing more worth-while and profitable.
Carson McCullers
#20. 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
#21. The value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself.
Carson McCullers
#22. It is music that causes the heart to broaden and the listener to grow cold with ecstasy and fright.
Carson McCullers
#23. What did he understand? Nothing. Where was he headed? Nowhere. What did he want? To know. What? A meaning. Why? A riddle.
Carson McCullers
#25. And now, as a summer flower shatters in September ,it was finished.
Carson McCullers
#26. There is no stillness like the quiet of the first cold nights in the fall.
Carson McCullers
#27. The human heart is a lonely hunter-but the search for us southerners is more anguished ...
Carson McCullers
#28. 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
#29. Each day was very much like any other day, because they were alone so much that nothing ever disturbed them.
Carson McCullers
#30. Leonora Penderton feared neither man, beast, nor the devil; God she had never known.
Carson McCullers
#31. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. I think we look for the differences in people because it makes us less lonely.
Carson McCullers
#36. How can the dead be truly dead when they still live in the souls of those who are left behind?
Carson McCullers
#38. 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
#39. He had a few eccentricities himself and was tolerant of the peculiarities of others; indeed, he rather relished the ridiculous.
Carson McCullers
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. The memories of childhood have a strange shuttling quality, and areas of darkness ring the spaces of light. The memories of childhood are like clear candles in an acre of night, illuminating fixed scenes from surrounding darkness.
Carson McCullers
#44. 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
#45. Once you have lived with another, it is a great torture to have to live alone.
Carson McCullers
#46. 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
#47. A person can't pick up they children and just squeeze them to which-a-way they wants them to be.
Carson McCullers
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. He was thinking that in nearly every person there was some special physical part kept always guarded.
Carson McCullers
#56. 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
#58. 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
#60. 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
#61. It was a small of her back and her face that got so tired. Their (her retail employer's) mono was supposed to be, 'Keep on your toes and smile.' Once she was out of the store she had to frown a long time to get her face natural again. Even her ears were tired.
Carson McCullers
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. To know who you are, you have to have a place to come from.
Carson McCullers
#65. Us going to have a cup of coffee. Then maybe it all won't seem so bad.
Carson McCullers
#67. Falling in love is the easiest thing in the world. It's standing in love that matters.
Carson McCullers
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. A person's got to fight for every single thing they get,' she said slowly. 'And I've noticed a lot of times that the farther down a kid comes in the family the better the kid really is.
Carson McCullers
#73. The whole world was this symphony, and there was not enough of her to listen.
Carson McCullers
#74. Don't you loathe it when doctors use the word 'we' when it applies only and solely to yourself?
Carson McCullers
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. German lieder is creepy music. That's why I specialize in it.
Carson McCullers
#81. I go all around and try to tell them. And they laugh. I can't make them understand anything. No matter what I say I can't seem to make them see the truth.
Carson McCullers
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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
#87. In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together.
Carson McCullers
#89. He was like a man who had served a term in prison or had been to Harvard College or had lived for a long time with foreigners in South America.
Carson McCullers
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. I am not meant to be alone and without you who understands.
Carson McCullers
#93. 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
#94. His own life seemed so solitary, a fragile column supporting nothing amidst the wreckage of the years.
Carson McCullers
#95. Son, do you know how love should be begun?"
The boy sat small and listening and still. Slowly he shook his head. The old man leaned closer and whispered:
"A tree. A rock. A cloud.
Carson McCullers
#96. She did not know why she was sad, but because of this peculiar sadness, she began to realize she ought to leave the town.
Carson McCullers
#99. I live with the people I create and it has always made my essential loneliness less keen.
Carson McCullers
#100. 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
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
