"A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lillies of the swamp."
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Quote collection
Carson McCullers quotes (page 4 of 6)
115 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The closest thing to being cared for is to care for someone else."
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"The most fatal thing a man can do is try to stand alone."
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"I must go home periodically to renew my sense of horror."
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"I want - I want - I want - was all that she could think about - but just what this real want was she did not know."
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"Coming down was the hardest part of any climbing."
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"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."
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"Jesus would be framed and in jail if he was living today."
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"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."
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"Death is the great gamer with a sleeve of tricks."
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"The value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself."
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"There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries."
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"I meditated on love and reasoned it out. I realized what is wrong with us. Men fall in love for the first time. And what do they fall in love with? ...They fall in love with a woman. They start at the wrong end of love. They begin at the climax. Can you wonder it is so miserable? Do you know how men should love? A tree. A rock. A cloud."
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"The dimensions of a work of art are seldom realized by the author until the work is accomplished. It is like a flowering dream. Ideas grow, budding silently, and there are a thousand illuminations coming day by day as the work progresses. A seed grows in writing as in nature. The seed of the idea is developed by both labor and the unconscious, and the struggle that goes on between them."
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"When a person knows and can't make the others understand, what does he do?"
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"Now hoppin'-john was F. Jasmine's very favorite food. She had always warned them to wave a plate of rice and peas before her nose when she was in her coffin, to make certain there was no mistake; for if a breath of life was left in her, she would sit up and eat, but if she smelled the hopping-john, and did not stir, then they could just nail down the coffin and be certain she was truly dead."
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"Comparing the Brooklyn that I know with Manhattan is like comparing a comfortable and complacent duenna to her more brilliant and neurotic sister."
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"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."
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"You don't know what it is to store up a lot of details and then come upon something real."
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"I see a green tree. And to me it is green. And you would call the tree green also. And we would agree on this. But is the colour you see as green the same colour I see as green?"
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