Carson McCullers
The mind is like a richly woven tapestry in which the colors are distilled from the experiences of the senses, and the design drawn from the convolutions of the intellect.Collection: Design
The theme is the theme of humiliation, which is the square root of sin, as opposed to the freedom from humiliation, and love, which is the square root of wonderful.Collection: Freedom
I live with the people I create and it has always made my essential loneliness less keen.
There's nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book.
We are torn between 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.Collection: Travel
Falling in love is the easiest thing in the world. It's standing in love that matters.Collection: Falling In Love
How can the dead be truly dead when they still live in the souls of those who are left behind?Collection: Soul
To know who you are, you have to have a place to come from.Collection: Knows
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!Collection: Lonely
All we can do is go around telling the truth.Collection: Telling The Truth
The writer is by nature a dreamer - a conscious dreamer.Collection: Dreamer
I must go home periodically to renew my sense of horror.Collection: Home
The thinking mind is best controlled by the imagination.Collection: Thinking
Southerners are the more lonely and spiritually estranged, I think, because we have lived so long in an artificial social system that we insisted was natural and right and just - when all along we knew it wasn't.Collection: Lonely
For fear is a primary source of evil. And when the question "Who am I?" recurs and is unanswered, then fear and frustration project a negative attitude. The bewildered soul can answer only: "Since I do not understand 'Who I am,' I only know what I am not." The corollary of this emotional incertitude is snobbism, intolerance and racial hate. The xenophobic individual can only reject and destroy, as the xenophobic nation inevitably makes war.Collection: Attitude
Love is the bridge that leads from the I sense to the We, and there is a paradox about personal love. Love of another individual opens a new relation between the personality and the world. The lover responds in a new way to nature and may even write poetry. Love is affirmation; it motivates the yes responses and the sense of wider communication. Love casts out fear, and in the security of this togetherness we find contentment, courage. We no longer fear the age-old haunting questions: "Who am I?" "Why am I?" "Where am I going?" - and having cast out fear, we can be honest and charitable.Collection: Communication
Resentment is the most precious flower of poverty.Collection: Flower
We are homesick most for the places we have never known.Collection: Jukebox
There is no stillness like the quiet of the first cold nights in the fall.Collection: Fall
Love is a joint experience between two persons -- but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved.Collection: Mean
It was better to be in a jail where you could bang the walls than in a jail you could not see.Collection: Wall
A writer soon discovers he has no single identity but lives the lives of all the people he creates and his weathers are independent of the actual day around him. I live with the people I create and it has always made my essential loneliness less keen.Collection: Loneliness
The closest thing to being cared for is to care for someone else.Collection: Caring
I want - I want - I want - was all that she could think about - but just what this real want was she did not know.Collection: Real
The most fatal thing a man can do is try to stand alone.Collection: Freedom
I'm not explaining this right. What happened was this. There were these beautiful feelings and loose little pleasures inside me. And this woman was something like an assembly line for my soul. I run these little pieces of myself through her and I come out complete. Now do you follow me?Collection: Beautiful
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.Collection: Dream
I have more to say than Hemingway, and God knows, I say it better than Faulkner.Collection: God Knows
I got to wear blinders all the time so I won't think sideways or in the past.Collection: Past
Maybe when people longed for a thing that bad the longing made them trust in anything that might give it to them.Collection: People
The seed of the idea is developed by both labor and the unconscious, and the struggle that goes on between them.Collection: Struggle
There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries.Collection: Country
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.Collection: Hurt
Comparing the Brooklyn that I know with Manhattan is like comparing a comfortable and complacent duenna to her more brilliant and neurotic sister.Collection: Manhattan
Imagination takes humility, love and great courage.Collection: Love
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.Collection: Lonely
She stood in front of the mirror a long time, and finally decided she either looked like a sap or else she looked very beautiful. One or the other.Collection: Beautiful
We wander, question. But the answer waits in each separate heart - the answer of our own identity and the way by which we can master loneliness and feel that at last we belong.Collection: Loneliness
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.Collection: Falling In Love
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.Collection: Writing
The people dreamed and fought and slept as much as ever. And by habit they shortened their thoughts so that they would not wander out into the darkness beyond tomorrow.Collection: People
Next to music beer was best.Collection: Funny
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.Collection: Writing
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?Collection: Tree
The writer must hew the phantom rock.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Lying
... and we are not alone in this slavery. there are millions of others throughout the world, of all colors and races and creeds. this we must remember. there are many of our people who hate the poor of the white race, and they hate us. the people in this town living by the river who work in the mills. people who are almost as much in need as we are ourselves. this hatred is a great evil, and no good can ever come from it... the injustice of need must bring us all together and not separate us. we must remember that we all make the things of this earth of value because of labor.Collection: Hate
A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lillies of the swamp.Collection: Beautiful
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.Collection: Country
When a person knows and can't make the others understand, what does he do?Collection: Doe