"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."
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Carson McCullers quotes (page 1 of 6)
115 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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!"
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"We are homesick most for the places we have never known."
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"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."
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"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."
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"The writer is by nature a dreamer - a conscious dreamer."
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"How can the dead be truly dead when they still live in the souls of those who are left behind?"
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"Falling in love is the easiest thing in the world. It's standing in love that matters."
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"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."
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"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."
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"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."
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"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."
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"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?"
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"The thinking mind is best controlled by the imagination."
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"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."
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"The Heart is a Lonely Hunter."
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"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."
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"I think we look for the differences in people because it makes us less lonely."
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"I´m a stranger in a strange land."
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"I have never gone to a doctor in my adult life, feeling instinctively that doctors meant either cutting or, just as bad, diet."
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