"Listen,” F. Jasmine said. “What I’ve been trying to say is this. Doesn’t it strike you as strange that I am I, and you are you? I am F. Jasmine Addams. And you are Berenice Sadie Brown. And we can look at each other, and touch each other, and stay together year in and year out in the same room. Yet always I am I, and you are you. And I can’t ever be anything else but me, and you can ever be anything else but you. Have you ever thought of that? And does it seem to you strange?"

3 likes

Source: Carson McCullers (1998). “Collected Stories of Carson McCullers”, p.371, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

About the author

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.'

All quotes by Carson McCullers →

Same author

More quotes by Carson McCullers

See all →
Carson McCullers Novelist

"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!"

Read quote
Carson McCullers Novelist

"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."

Read quote