Top 160 Carson McCullers Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The most fatal thing a man can do is try to stand alone.”

— Carson McCullers

52. “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

53. “The world is certainty a sudden place.”

— Carson McCullers

54. “It was funny, too, how lonesome a person could be in a crowded house.”

— Carson McCullers

55. “By the moonlight he watched his wife for the last time. His hand sought the adjacent flesh and sorrow paralleled desire in the immense complexity of love.”

— Carson McCullers

56. “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

57. “She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world.”

— Carson McCullers

58. “You mind Ralph,” she called back to Bubber. “Mind the gnats don’t sit on his eyelids.”

— Carson McCullers

59. “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

60. “The theme is the theme of humiliation, which is the square root of sin, as opposed to the freedom from humiliation, and love, which is the square root of wonderful.”

— Carson McCullers

61. “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

62. “Comparing the Brooklyn that I know with Manhattan is like comparing a comfortable and complacent duenna to her more brilliant and neurotic sister.”

— Carson McCullers

63. “Once you have lived with another, it is a great torture to have to live alone.”

— Carson McCullers

64. “The value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself.”

— Carson McCullers

65. “I have never gone to a doctor in my adult life, feeling instinctively that doctors meant either cutting or, just as bad, diet.”

— Carson McCullers

66. “With her it was like there was two places – the inside room and the outside room.”

— Carson McCullers

67. “It is music that causes the heart to broaden and the listener to grow cold with ecstasy and fright.”

— Carson McCullers

68. “But all the time-no matter what she was doing-there was music.”

— Carson McCullers

69. “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.”

— Carson McCullers

70. “The others all have something they hate. And they all have something they love more than eating or sleeping or wine or friendly company. That is why they are always so busy.”

— Carson McCullers

71. “In the face of brutality I was prudent. Before injustice I held my peace. I sacrificed the things in hand for the good of they hypothetical whole. I believed in the tongue instead of the fist. As an armor against oppression I taught patience and faith in the human soul I know now how wrong I was. I have been a traitor to myself and to my people. All that is not. Now is the time to act and to act quickly. Fight cunning with cunning and might with might.”

— Carson McCullers

72. “Again, the terror, the acknowledgment of wasted years and death. Valentin, responsive and confident, still nestled in his arms. His cheek touched the soft cheek and felt the brush of the delicate eyelashes. With inner desperation he pressed the child close – as though an emotion as protean as his love could dominate the pulse of time.”

— Carson McCullers

73. “After the first establishment of identity there comes the imperative need to lose this new-found sense of separateness and to belong to something larger and more powerful than the weak, lonely self. The sense of moral isolation is intolerable to us.”

— Carson McCullers

74. “The three of them sat at the kitchen table, saying the same things over and over, so that by August the words began to rhyme with each other and sound strange.”

— Carson McCullers

75. “In his heart there coursed a wild tirade of curses, words of love, supplications, and abuse. But in the end he turned away, still silent.”

— Carson McCullers

76. “April that year came sudden and still, and the green of the trees was a wild bright green. The pale wistarias bloomed all over town, and silently the blossoms shattered. There was something about the green trees and the flowers of April that made Frankie sad. She did not know why she was sad, but because of this peculiar sadness, she began to realize she ought to leave the town.”

— Carson McCullers

77. “Aber die Erinnerung kommt nie von vorne auf einen zu – sie kommt seitlich um die Ecke.”

— Carson McCullers

78. “The seed of the idea is developed by both labor and the unconscious, and the struggle that goes on between them.”

— Carson McCullers

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

— Carson McCullers

80. “He was like a man who had served a term in prison or had been to Harvard College or had lived for a long time with foreigners in South America.”

— Carson McCullers

81. “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. But still he wandered through the streets of the town, always silent and alone.”

— Carson McCullers

82. “The loneliness in him was so keen that he was filled with terror. Usually he had a pint of bootleg white lightning. He drank the raw liquor and by daylight he was warm and relaxed.”

— Carson McCullers

83. “All we can do is go around telling the truth.”

— Carson McCullers

84. “His own life seemed so solitary, a fragile column supporting nothing amidst the wreckage of the years.”

— Carson McCullers

85. “Owing to the fact he was a mute they were able to give him all the qualities they wanted him to have.”

— Carson McCullers

86. “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

87. “Coming down was the hardest part of any climbing.”

— Carson McCullers

88. “The love she felt was so hard that she had to squeeze him to her until her arms were tired.”

— Carson McCullers

89. “You don’t know what it is to store up a lot of details and then come upon something real.”

— Carson McCullers

90. “It was like she was cheated. Only nobody had cheated her. So there was nobody to take it out on. However, just the same she had that feeling. Cheated.”

— Carson McCullers

91. “Leonora Penderton feared neither man, beast, nor the devil; God she had never known.”

— Carson McCullers

92. “And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being loved is intolerable to many.”

— Carson McCullers

93. “There was something about speaking in a foreign language that made her feel like she’d been around a lot.”

— Carson McCullers

94. “Afterward the Captain was to tell himself that in this one instant he knew everything. Actually, in a moment when a great but unknown shock is expected, the mind instinctively prepares itself by abandoning momentarily the faculty of surprise. In that vulnerable instant a kaleidoscope of half-guessed possibilities project themselves, and when the disaster has defined itself there is the feeling of having understood beforehand in some supernatural way.”

— Carson McCullers

95. “The writer must hew the phantom rock.”

— Carson McCullers

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

— Carson McCullers

97. “They are all very busy people. In fact they are so busy that it will be hard for you to picture them. I do not mean that they work at their jobs all day and night but that they have much business in their minds always that does not let them rest.”

— Carson McCullers

98. “German lieder is creepy music. That’s why I specialize in it.”

— Carson McCullers

99. “A person’s got to fight for every single thing they get,′ she said slowly. ‘And I’ve noticed a lot of times that the farther down a kid comes in the family the better the kid really is.”

— Carson McCullers

100. “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