Carson McCullers
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.Collection: Mistake
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?Collection: Struggle
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.Collection: Running
Nothing is so musical as the sound of pouring bourbon for the first drink on a Sunday morning. Not Bach or Schubert or any of those masters.Collection: Morning
justice itself is a chimera, a delusion. Justice is not a flat yardstick, applied in equal measure to an equal situation.Collection: Justice
Love is the main generator of all good writing... Love, passion, compassion, are all welded together.Collection: Passion
But the hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes.Collection: Children
the way i need you is a loneliness i cannot bear.Collection: Loneliness
I´m a stranger in a strange land.Collection: Land
Owing to the fact he was a mute they were able to give him all the qualities they wanted him to have.Collection: Giving
The trouble with me is that for a long time I have just been an I person. All people belong to a We except me. Not to belong to a We makes you too lonesome.Collection: Long
I am not meant to be alone and without you who understands.Collection: Heart Is A Lonely Hunter
We live in the richest country in the world. There's plenty and to spare for no man, woman, or child to be in want. And in addition to this our country was founded on what should have been a great, true principle - the freedom, equality, and rights of each individual. Huh! And what has come of that start? There are corporations worth billions of dollars - and hundreds of thousands of people who don't get to eat.Collection: Country
Writing, for me, is a search for God.Collection: Writing
I think we look for the differences in people because it makes us less lonely.Collection: Lonely
The curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.Collection: Pain
Coming down was the hardest part of any climbing.Collection: Climbing
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.Collection: Memories
It is music that causes the heart to broaden and the listener to grow cold with ecstasy and fright.Collection: Heart
It was like she was cheated. Only nobody had cheated her. So there was nobody to take it out on. However, just the same she had that feeling. Cheated.Collection: Feelings
What are the sources of an illumination? To me, they come after hours of searching and keeping my soul ready. Yet they come in a flash, as a religious phenomenon. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter had such an illumination, beginning my long search for the truth of the story and flashing light into the long two years ahead.Collection: Lonely
I have never gone to a doctor in my adult life, feeling instinctively that doctors meant either cutting or, just as bad, diet.Collection: Cutting
His own life seemed so solitary, a fragile column supporting nothing amidst the wreckage of the years.Collection: Years
She wished there was some place where she could go to hum it out loud. Some kind of music was too private to sing in a house cram fall of people. It was funny, too, how lonesome a person could be in a crowded house.Collection: Fall
But you haven't never loved God nor even nair person. You hard and tough as cowhide. But just the same I knows you. This afternoon you going to roam all over the place without never being satisfied. You going to traipse all around like you haves to find something lost. You going to work yourself up with excitement. Your heart going to beat hard enough to kill you because you don't love and don't have peace. And then some day you going to bust loose and be ruined.Collection: Atheist
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.Collection: Pieces
There are those who know and those who don't know. And for every ten thousand who don't know there's only one who knows. That's the miracle of all time--the fact that these millions know so much but don't know this.Collection: Miracle
But all the time-no matter what she was doing-there was music.Collection: Matter
Sunday afternoons are the longest afternoons of all.Collection: Sunday
Passion is more important than justice.Collection: Passion
People felt themselves watching him even before they knew that there was anything different about him. His eyes made a person think that he heard things that no one else had ever heard, that he knew things no one had ever guessed before. He did not seem quite human.Collection: Eye
Her face felt like it was scattered in pieces and she could not keep it straight. The feeling was a whole lot worse than being hungry for any dinner, yet it was like that. I want--I want--I want--was all that she could think about--but just what this real want was she did no know.Collection: Real
That was the best of all. To speak the truth and be attended.Collection: Speak
There are all these people here I don't know by sight or by name. And we pass alongside each other and don't have any connection. And they don't know me and I don't know them. And now I'm leaving town and there are all these people I will never know.Collection: Sight
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?Collection: Years
While Time, The endless idiot, runs screaming round the world.Collection: Running
There was hope in him, and soon perhaps the outline of his journey would take form.Collection: Journey
In the face of brutality I was prudent. Before injustice I held my peace. I sacrificed the things in hand for the good of the hypothetical whole. I believed in the tongue instead of the fist. As an armor against oppression I taught patience and faith in the human soul. I know now how wrong I was. I have been a traitor to myself and to my people. All that is rot.Collection: Fighting
Some men are heroes by nature in that they will give all that is in them without regard to the effort or to the personal returns.Collection: Hero
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.Collection: Stupid
And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being loved is intolerable to many.Collection: Secret
Once you have lived with another, it is a great torture to have to live alone.Collection: Torture
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.Collection: Taken
All men are lonely. But sometimes it seems to me that we Americans are the loneliest of all. Our hunger for foreign places and new ways has been with us almost like a national disease. Our literature is stamped with a quality of longing and unrest, and our writers have been great wanderers.Collection: Lonely
The value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself.Collection: Love Is
I was like a cat always climbing the wrong tree.Collection: Cat
The human heart is a lonely hunter-but the search for us southerners is more anguished.Collection: Lonely
Doctors, by God; washing their hands, looking out windows, fiddling with dreadful things while you are stretched out on a table or half undressed on a chair.Collection: Doctors
Death is the great gamer with a sleeve of tricks.Collection: Death