"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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Source: Carson McCullers (2012). “The Ballad of the Sad Café”, p.133, Penguin UK

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Carson McCullers

Novelist

Carson McCullers was an American novelist and playwright known for her poignant exploration of loneliness and identity in works like 'The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.'

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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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