Carson Mccullers Quotes (Showing 1-50 of 51) s1

Carson McCullers quotes (showing 1-50 of 51) "First of all, 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 are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which had lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer. So there is only one thing for the lover to do. He must house his love within himself as best he can; he must create for himself a whole new inward world — a world intense and strange, complete in himself. Let it be added here that this lover about whom we speak need not necessarily be a young man saving for a wedding ring — this lover can be man, woman, child, or indeed any human creature on this earth.

Now, the beloved can also be of any description. The most outlandish people can be the stimulus for love. A man may be a doddering great-grandfather and still love only a strange girl he saw in the streets of Cheehaw one afternoon two decades past. The preacher may love a fallen woman. The beloved may be treacherous, greasy-headed, and given to evil habits. Yes, and the lover may see this as clearly as anyone else — but that does not affect the evolution of his love one whit. A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lilies of the swamp. A good man may be the stimulus for a love both violent and debased, or a jabbering madman may bring about in the soul of someone a tender and simple idyll. Therefore, the value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself.

It is for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved. Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain." — Carson McCullers tags: unrequited-love 118 people liked it like "Next to music beer was best." — Carson McCullers (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter) tags: drinking, music 91 people liked it like "Maybe when people longed for a thing that bad the longing made them trust in anything that might give it to them." — Carson McCullers (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter) 88 people liked it like "the way i need you is a loneliness i cannot bear." — Carson McCullers (The Heart is a Lonely Hunter) 59 people liked it like "And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being loved is intolerable to many." — Carson McCullers (The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories) 36 people liked it like "How can the dead be truly dead when they still live in the souls of those who are left behind?" — Carson McCullers (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter) 36 people liked it

1 like "We are homesick most for the places we have never known." — Carson McCullers 27 people liked it like "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 (A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud) 25 people liked it like "I think we look for the differences in people because it makes us less lonely." — Carson McCullers 23 people liked it like "It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With Americans, it is a national trait, as native to us as the roller-coaster or the jukebox. It is no simple longing for the home town or country of our birth. 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." — Carson McCullers 23 people liked it like "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 (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter) 19 people liked it like "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 (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter) 18 people liked it like "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 (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter) 17 people liked it like "They are the we of me." — Carson McCullers (The Member of the Wedding: A Play) tags: marriage 16 people liked it like "All we can do is go around telling the truth." — Carson McCullers (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter) 12 people liked it like " 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

2 framed and in jail if he was living today." — Carson McCullers (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter) 12 people liked it like "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 (The Mortgaged Heart) tags: finding-oneself 11 people liked it like "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 (The Member of the Wedding) tags: loneliness 11 people liked it like "But all the time-no matter what she was doing-there was music." — Carson McCullers 11 people liked it like "This was her, Mick Kelly, walking in the daytime and by herself at night. In the hot sun and in the dark with all the plans and feelings. This music was her—the real plain her...This music did not take a long time or a short time. It did not have anything to do with time going by at all. She sat with her arms around her legs, biting her salty knee very hard. The whole world was this symphony, and there was not enough of her to listen... Now that it was over there was only her heart beating like a rabbit and this terrible hurt." — Carson McCullers (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter) tags: rabbit-heart 10 people liked it like "The closest thing to being cared for is to care for someone else." — Carson McCullers (The Square Root of Wonderful) tags: care, caring 10 people liked it like "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 (The Ballad of the Sad Cafe: and Other Stories) 10 people liked it like "Listen,” F. Jasmine said. “What I’ve been trying to say is this. Doesn’t it strike you as strange that I am I, and you are you? I am F. Jasmine Addams. And you are Berenice Sadie Brown. And we can look at each other, and touch each other, and stay together year in and year out in the same room. Yet always I am I, and you are you. And I can’t ever be anything else but me, and you can ever be anything else but you. Have you ever thought of that? And does it seem to you strange? " — Carson McCullers (Member of the Wedding) 9 people liked it like "while time, the endless idiot, runs screaming around the world" — Carson McCullers 9 people liked it like

3 "The thinking mind is best controlled by the imagination." — Carson McCullers (Illumination and Night Glare: The Unfinished Autobiography of Carson McCullers) tags: imagination 8 people liked it like "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 8 people liked it like "If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are gone, either write things worth reading or do things worth writing." — Carson McCullers 7 people liked it like "But the hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes. The heart of a hurt child can shrink so that forever afterward it is hard and pitted as the seed of a peach. Or again, the heart of such a child may fester and swell until it is a misery to carry within the body, easily chafed and hurt by the most ordinary things." — Carson McCullers (The Ballad of the Sad Cafe: and Other Stories) 7 people liked it like "... and we are not alone in this slavery. there are millions of others throughout the world, of all colors and races and creeds. this we must remember. there are many of our people who hate the poor of the white race, and they hate us. the people in this town living by the river who work in the mills. people who are almost as much in need as we are ourselves. this hatred is a great evil, and no good can ever come from it... the injustice of need must bring us all together and not separate us. we must remember that we all make the things of this earth of value because of labor." — Carson McCullers (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter) tags: equality 5 people liked it like "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 5 people liked it like "Wherever you look there’s meanness and corruption. This room, this bottle of grape wine, these fruits in the basket, are all products of profit and loss. A fellow can’t live without giving his passive acceptance to meanness. Somebody wears his tail to a frazzle for every mouthful we eat and every stitch we wear—and nobody seems to know. Everybody is blind, dumb, and blunt-headed—stupid and mean." — Carson McCullers (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter) 5 people liked it like "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

4 charitable." — Carson McCullers (The Mortgaged Heart) tags: love 5 people liked it like "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 (The Ballad of the Sad Cafe: and Other Stories) 4 people liked it like "There is no stillness like the quiet of the first cold nights in the fall." — Carson McCullers (The Ballad of the Sad Cafe: and Other Stories) 4 people liked it like "The most outlandish people can be the stimulus for love...A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lilies of the swamp. A good man may be the stimulus for a love both violent and debased, or a jabbering madman may bring about in the soul of someone a tender and simple idyll. Therefore, the value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself.

It is for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved. Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many. " — Carson McCullers 3 people liked it like "The value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself." — Carson McCullers (The Ballad of the Sad Cafe: and Other Stories) 3 people liked it like "Once you have lived with another, it is a great torture to have to live alone." — Carson McCullers (The Ballad of the Sad Cafe: and Other Stories) 3 people liked it like "It is music that causes the heart to broaden and the listener to grow cold with ecstasy and fright." — Carson McCullers (The Ballad of the Sad Cafe: and Other Stories) 3 people liked it like "I´m a stranger in a strange land." — Carson McCullers (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter) tags: strangers 3 people liked it like "In the face of brutality I was prudent. Before injustice I held my peace. I sacrificed the things in hand for the good of they hypothetical whole. I believed in the tongue instead of the fist. As an armor against oppression I taught patience and faith in the human soul I know now how wrong I was. I have been a traitor to myself and to my people. All that is not. Now is the time to act and to act quickly. Fight cunning with cunning and might with might" — Carson McCullers (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter) 2 people liked it like

5 "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 2 people liked it like "Owing to the fact he was a mute they were able to give him all the qualities they wanted him to have." — Carson McCullers (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter) tags: qualities 2 people liked it like "After the first establishment of identity there comes the imperative need to lose this new-found sense of separateness and to belong to something larger and more powerful than the weak, lonely self. The sense of moral isolation is intolerable to us." — Carson McCullers (The Mortgaged Heart) tags: identity 2 people liked it like "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 (The Mortgaged Heart) tags: fear 2 people liked it like "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. Often after you have sweated and tried and things are not better for you, there comes a feeling deep down in the soul that you are not worth much." — Carson McCullers (The Ballad of the Sad Cafe: and Other Stories) 2 people liked it like "Day and night she had drudged and struggled and thrown her soul into her work, and there was not much of her left over for anything else. Being human, she suffered from this lack and did what she could to make up for it. If she passed the evening bent over a table in the library and later declared that she had spent that time playing cards, it was as though she had managed to do both those things. Through the lies, she lived vicariously. The lies doubled the little of her existence that was left over from work and augmented the little rag end of her personal life." — Carson McCullers (The Ballad of the Sad Cafe: and Other Stories) 2 people liked it like "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 (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter) 1 person liked it like "Then at last the opening music came again, with all the different instruments bunched together for each note like a hard, tight fist that socked at her heart. And the first part was over. This music did not take a long time or a short time. It did not have anything to do with time going by at all. She sat

6 with her arms held tight around her legs, biting her salty knee very hard. It might have been five minutes she listened or half the night. The second part was black-colored--a slow march. Not sad, but like the whole world was dead and black and there was no use thinking back how it was before. One of those horn kind of insturments played a sad and silver tune. Then the music rose up angry and with excitement underneath. And finally the black march again." — Carson McCullers (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter) 1 person liked it like "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 (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter) 1 person liked it like "The most fatal thing a man can do is try to stand alone." — Carson McCullers (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter)