Carson McCullers Quotes

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

I do not have any home. So why should I be homesick?

The way I need you is a loneliness I cannot bear.

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. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which has lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto.

Maybe when people longed for a thing that bad the longing made them trust in anything that might give it to them.

Because of the insolence of all the white race he was afraid to lose his dignity in friendliness.

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.

If you walk along the main street on an August afternoon there is nothing whatsoever to do.

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.

This was the summer when for a long time she had not been a member. She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world. Frankie had become an unjoined person who hung around in the doorways, and she was afraid.

It is far better for the profits of our purse to be taken from us than to be robbed of the riches of our minds and souls.

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 rollercoaster or the jukebox. It is no simple longing for the home town or the 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.

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 full of people. It was funny, too, how lonesome a person could be in a crowded house.

I'm one who knows. I'm a stranger in a strange land.

In his face there came to be a brooding peace that is seen most often in the faces of the very sorrowful or the very wise.