A collection of thoughts and quotes by Carson McCullers on music, drinking, love, nostalgia, freedom, liberty, privacy, cruelty, neglect, hate, loneliness, brooding and wisdom.
95 Insightful Quotes By Carson McCullers, The Pioneer Of Southern Gothic
Maybe when people longed for a thing that bad the longing made them trust in anything that might give it to them.
Carson McCullers
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.
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.
And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being loved is intolerable to many.
Carson McCullers
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.
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
I do not have any home. So why should I be homesick?
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.
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.
There was hope in him, and soon perhaps the outline of his journey would take form.
Carson McCullers
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.
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.
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.
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
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
Resentment is the most precious flower of poverty.
Carson McCullers
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.
And by habit they shortened their thoughts so that they would not wander out into the darkness beyond tomorrow.
Carson McCullers
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.
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
Wonderful music like this was the worst hurt there could be. The whole world was this symphony, and there was not enough of her to listen.
That was the best of all. To speak the truth and be attended.
Carson McCullers
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
That was all he wanted for himself – to give to her. Biff's mouth hardened. He had done nothing wrong but in him he felt a strange guilt. Why? The dark guilt in all men, unreckoned and without a name.
Carson McCullers
You don't know what it is to store up a lot of details and then come upon something real.
It was almost three o'clock, the most stagnant hour in the day or night.
Carson McCullers
Nothing had really changed....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
In her heart it didn't give her near the same feeling that music did. Nothing was really as good as music.
There was a hollow in her chest, but at the bottom of this emptiness a heavy weight pressed down and bruised her stomach, so that she felt sick.
Carson McCullers
You have a name and one thing after another happens to you, and you behave in various ways and do things, so that soon the name begins to have a meaning. Things have accumulated around your name.
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
He had a few eccentricities himself and was tolerant of the peculiarities of others; indeed, he rather relished the ridiculous.
Carson McCullers
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.
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
It was funny, too, how lonesome a person could be in a crowded house.
Carson McCullers
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
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.
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.
There was none of the quiet insolence about this man.
Carson McCullers
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.
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.
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
He was thinking that in nearly every person there was some special physical part kept always guarded.
Carson McCullers
He could not understand the wild quiver of his heart, nor the following sense of recklessness and grace that lingered after she was gone.
She had always kept things to herself. That was one sure truth.
Carson McCullers
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
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
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.
Is agony immobilized. While Time,
The endless idiot, runs screaming round the world. ){kind=spacer}
