"The human heart is a lonely hunter-but the search for us southerners is more anguished."
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Quote collection
Carson McCullers quotes (page 5 of 6)
115 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I was like a cat always climbing the wrong tree."
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"I do not have any home. So why should I be homesick?"
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"This fear is one of the horrors of an author's life. Where does work come from? What chance, what small episode will start the chain of creation? I once wrote a story about a writer who could not write anymore, and my friend Tennessee Williams said, 'How could you dare write that story, it's the most frightening work I have ever read.' I was pretty well sunk while I was writing it."
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"His own life seemed so solitary, a fragile column supporting nothing amidst the wreckage of the years."
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"The memories of childhood have a strange shuttling quality, and areas of darkness ring the spaces of light. The memories of childhood are like clear candles in an acre of night, illuminating fixed scenes from surrounding darkness."
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"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."
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"For you see, when us people who know run into each other that's an event. It almost never happens. Sometimes we meet each other and neither guesses that the other is one who knows. That's a bad thing. It's happened to me a lot of times. But you see there are so few of us."
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"Once you have lived with another, it is a great torture to have to live alone."
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"And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being loved is intolerable to many."
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"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?"
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"Owing to the fact he was a mute they were able to give him all the qualities they wanted him to have."
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"It was like they waited to tell each other things that had never been told before. What she had to say was terrible and afraid. But what he would tell her was so true that it would make everything all right. Maybe it was a thing that could not be spoken with words or writing. Maybe he would have to let her understand this in a different way. That was the feeling she had with him."
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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."
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"Love is the main generator of all good writing... Love, passion, compassion, are all welded together."
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"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."
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"They are the we of me."
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"The world is certainty a sudden place."
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"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."
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"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."
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