Born in Columbus, Georgia, Carson McCullers was an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, poet, and essayist. She wrote several novels, including The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), Reflections In A Golden Eye (1941) and The Member Of The Wedding (1946).
Carson McCullers’ writing style has been described as “poetic”, “vivid”, “dramatic”, “powerful”, and “intense”. She often uses symbolism and metaphor to express her feelings.
Here are some of Carson McCullers’ most inspirational quotes.
The writer is by nature a dreamer – a conscious dreamer.
– Carson McCullers
Carson McCullers Quotes
1. “Imagination takes humility, love and great courage.” – Carson McCullers
2. “The thinking mind is best controlled by the imagination.” – Carson McCullers
3. “The value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself.” – Carson McCullers
4. “The world is certainty a sudden place.” – Carson McCullers
5. “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.” – Carson McCullers
6. “Love is the main generator of all good writing… Love, passion, compassion, are all welded together.” – Carson McCullers
7. “Resentment is the most precious flower of poverty.” – Carson McCullers
8. “The seed of the idea is developed by both labor and the unconscious, and the struggle that goes on between them.” – Carson McCullers
9. “The writer must hew the phantom rock.” – Carson McCullers
10. “It was better to be in a jail where you could bang the walls than in a jail you could not see.” – Carson McCullers
11. “How can the dead be truly dead when they still live in the souls of those who are left behind?” – Carson McCullers
12. “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.” – Carson McCullers
13. “I think we look for the differences in people because it makes us less lonely.” – Carson McCullers
14. “There is so much truth in children and so little self-consciousness. It always strikes me that they are so capable of losing and finding themselves and also losing and finding those things they feel close to.” – Carson McCullers
15. “All we can do is go around telling the truth.” – Carson McCullers
16. “When a person knows and can’t make the others understand, what does he do?” – Carson McCullers
17. “If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are gone, either write things worth reading or do things worth writing.” – Carson McCullers
18. “It was almost three o’clock, the most stagnant hour in the day or night.” – Carson McCullers
19. “Coming down was the hardest part of any climbing.” – Carson McCullers
20. “To know who you are, you have to have a place to come from.” – Carson McCullers
21. “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.” – Carson McCullers
22. “Writing, for me, is a search for God.” – Carson McCullers
23. “The closest thing to being cared for is to care for someone else.” – Carson McCullers
24. “The most fatal thing a man can do is try to stand alone.” – Carson McCullers
25. “There are corporations worth billions of dollars – and hundreds of thousands of people who don’t get to eat.” – Carson McCullers
26. “There’s nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book.” – Carson McCullers
27. “The endless idiot, runs screaming round the world.” – Carson McCullers
28. “And by habit they shortened their thoughts so that they would not wander out into the darkness beyond tomorrow.” – Carson McCullers
29. “A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lillies of the swamp.” – Carson McCullers
30. “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.” – Carson McCullers
31. “Once you have lived with another, it is a great torture to have to live alone.” – Carson McCullers
32. “I wish I was somebody else except me.” – Carson McCullers
33. “And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being loved is intolerable to many.” – Carson McCullers
34. “I´m a stranger in a strange land.” – Carson McCullers
35. “It is for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved. Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many.” – Carson McCullers
36. “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.” – Carson McCullers
37. “It was funny, too, how lonesome a person could be in a crowded house.” – Carson McCullers
38. “But all the time-no matter what she was doing-there was music.” – Carson McCullers
39. “We are homesick most for the places we have never known.” – Carson McCullers
40. “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.” – Carson McCullers
41. “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 love and the struggle that goes with love?” – Carson McCullers
42. “You don’t know what it is to store up a lot of details and then come upon something real.” – Carson McCullers
43. “There is no stillness like the quiet of the first cold nights in the fall.” – Carson McCullers
44. “Next to music, beer was best.” – Carson McCullers
45. “Maybe when people longed for a thing that bad the longing made them trust in anything that might give it to them.” – Carson McCullers
46. “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!” – Carson McCullers
47. “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.” – Carson McCullers
48. “The whole world was this symphony, and there was not enough of her to listen.” – Carson McCullers
49. “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.” – Carson McCullers
50. “But the hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes. The heart of a hurt child can shrink so that forever afterward it is hard and pitted as the seed of a peach. Or again, the heart of such a child may fester and swell until it is a misery to carry within the body, easily chafed and hurt by the most ordinary things.” – Carson McCullers
51. “But look what the Church has done to Jesus during the last two thousand years. What they have made of Him. How they have turned every word He spoke for their own vile ends. Jesus would be framed and in jail if he was living today.” – Carson McCullers
