Quote collection
115 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
"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."
"To know who you are, you have to have a place to come from."
"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."
"But you haven't never loved God nor even nair person. You hard and tough as cowhide. But just the same I knows you. This afternoon you going to roam all over the place without never being satisfied. You going to traipse all around like you haves to find something lost. You going to work yourself up with excitement. Your heart going to beat hard enough to kill you because you don't love and don't have peace. And then some day you going to bust loose and be ruined."
"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."
"Next to music beer was best."
"I live with the people I create and it has always made my essential loneliness less keen."
"Maybe when people longed for a thing that bad the longing made them trust in anything that might give it to them."
"I got to wear blinders all the time so I won't think sideways or in the past."
"Writing, for me, is a search for God."
"It was better to be in a jail where you could bang the walls than in a jail you could not see."
"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."
"I have more to say than Hemingway, and God knows, I say it better than Faulkner."
"the way i need you is a loneliness i cannot bear."
"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."
"Imagination takes humility, love and great courage."
"It is music that causes the heart to broaden and the listener to grow cold with ecstasy and fright."
"What are the sources of an illumination? To me, they come after hours of searching and keeping my soul ready. Yet they come in a flash, as a religious phenomenon. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter had such an illumination, beginning my long search for the truth of the story and flashing light into the long two years ahead."
"I am not meant to be alone and without you who understands."