Carson McCullers Quotes

There’s nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book.

I live with the people I create and it has always made my essential loneliness less keen.

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

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

The thinking mind is best controlled by the imagination.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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?

All we can do is go around telling the truth.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

IВґm a stranger in a strange land.

Writing, for me, is a search for God.

I got to wear blinders all the time so I won’t think sideways or in the past.