Top 160 Carson McCullers Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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.”

— Carson McCullers

Featured in: Longing Quotes

2. “The writer is by nature a dreamer – a conscious dreamer.”

— Carson McCullers

3. “The closest thing to being cared for is to care for someone else.”

— Carson McCullers

4. “Next to music beer was best.”

— Carson McCullers

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

— Carson McCullers

6. “The thinking mind is best controlled by the imagination.”

— Carson McCullers

7. “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.”

— Carson McCullers

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

— Carson McCullers

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

— Carson McCullers

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

— Carson McCullers

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

— Carson McCullers

12. “Writing, for me, is a search for God.”

— Carson McCullers

13. “She was afraid of these things that made her suddenly wonder who she was, and what she was going to be in the world, and why she was standing at that minute, seeing a light, or listening, or staring up into the sky: alone.”

— Carson McCullers

14. “If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are gone, either write things worth reading or do things worth writing.”

— Carson McCullers

15. “I see a green tree. And to me it is green. And you would call the tree green also. And we would agree on this. But is the colour you see as green the same colour I see as green?”

— Carson McCullers

16. “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.”

— Carson McCullers

17. “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

18. “Passion is more important than justice.”

— Carson McCullers

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

— Carson McCullers

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

— Carson McCullers

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

21. “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

22. “Imagination takes humility, love and great courage.”

— Carson McCullers

23. “I think we look for the differences in people because it makes us less lonely.”

— Carson McCullers

24. “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.”

— Carson McCullers

25. “Sunday afternoons are the longest afternoons of all...”

— Carson McCullers

26. “Resentment is the most precious flower of poverty.”

— Carson McCullers

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

— Carson McCullers

28. “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.”

— Carson McCullers

29. “I was like a cat always climbing the wrong tree.”

— Carson McCullers

30. “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.”

— Carson McCullers

31. “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.”

— Carson McCullers

32. “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?”

— Carson McCullers

33. “When a person knows and can’t make the others understand, what does he do?”

— Carson McCullers

34. “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.”

— Carson McCullers

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

— Carson McCullers

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

— Carson McCullers

37. “She stood in front of the mirror a long time, and finally decided she either looked like a sap or else she looked very beautiful. One or the other.”

— Carson McCullers

38. “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

39. “It was almost three o’clock, the most stagnant hour in the day or night.”

— Carson McCullers

40. “Jesus would be framed and in jail if he was living today.”

— Carson McCullers

41. “That was the best of all. To speak the truth and be attended.”

— Carson McCullers

42. “There was hope in him, and soon perhaps the outline of his journey would take form.”

— Carson McCullers

43. “Once you have lived with another, it is a great torture to have to live alone. The silence of a firelit room when suddenly the clock stops ticking, the nervous shadows in an empty house – it is better to take in your mortal enemy than face the terror of living alone.”

— Carson McCullers

44. “I am not meant to be alone and without you who understands.”

— 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. “There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries.”

— Carson McCullers

Featured in: Country Quotes

47. “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.”

— Carson McCullers

48. “They are the we of me.”

— Carson McCullers

49. “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 be loved 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.”

— Carson McCullers

50. “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