Carson McCullers Quotes

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.

Falling in love is the easiest thing in the world. It's standing in love that matters.

How can the dead be truly dead when they still live in the souls of those who are left behind?

To know who you are, you have to have a place to come from.

All we can do is go around telling the truth.

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!

I must go home periodically to renew my sense of horror.

The writer is by nature a dreamer - a conscious dreamer.

The thinking mind is best controlled by the imagination.

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.

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.

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.

But the hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes.

We are homesick most for the places we have never known.

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.

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?

Love is the main generator of all good writing... Love, passion, compassion, are all welded together.

There is no stillness like the quiet of the first cold nights in the fall.

It was better to be in a jail where you could bang the walls than in a jail you could not see.

The most fatal thing a man can do is try to stand alone.

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.

Resentment is the most precious flower of poverty.

I want - I want - I want - was all that she could think about - but just what this real want was she did not know.

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.

I have more to say than Hemingway, and God knows, I say it better than Faulkner.