Top 160 Carson McCullers Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “I got to wear blinders all the time so I won’t think sideways or in the past.”

— Carson McCullers

102. “For we were thinking of freedom. That’s the word like a worm in my brain. Yes? No? How much? How little? The word is a signal for piracy and theft and cunning. We’ll be free and the smartest will then be able to enslave the others. But! But there is another meaning to the word. Of all words this one is the most dangerous. We who know must be wary. The word makes us feel good – in fact the word is a great ideal. But it’s with this ideal that the spiders spin their ugliest webs for us.”

— Carson McCullers

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

— Carson McCullers

104. “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 doorways, and she was afraid.”

— Carson McCullers

105. “Each day was very much like any other day, because they were alone so much that nothing ever disturbed them.”

— Carson McCullers

106. “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

107. “Wherever you look there’s meanness and corruption. This room, this bottle of grape wine, these fruits in the basket, are all products of profit and loss. A fellow can’t live without giving his passive acceptance to meanness. Somebody wears his tail to a frazzle for every mouthful we eat and every stitch we wear – and nobody seems to know. Everybody is blind, dumb, and blunt-headed – stupid and mean.”

— Carson McCullers

108. “Us going to have a cup of coffee. Then maybe it all won’t seem so bad.”

— Carson McCullers

109. “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

110. “Now that it was over there was only her heart like a rabbit and this terrible hurt.”

— Carson McCullers

111. “People, unless they are nilly-willy or very sick, cannot be taken into the hands and be changed overnight into somthing more worth-while and profitable.”

— Carson McCullers

112. “He had a few eccentricities himself and was tolerant of the peculiarities of others; indeed, he rather relished the ridiculous.”

— Carson McCullers

113. “He waited for the black, terrible anger as though for some beast out of the night. But it did not come to him. His bowels seemed weighted with lead, and he walked slowly and lingered against fences and the cold, wet walls of buildings by the way. Descent into the depths until at last there was no further chasm below. He touched the solid bottom of despair and there took ease.”

— Carson McCullers

114. “We all of us somehow caught. We born this way or that way and we don’t know why. But we caught any how. I was born Berenice. You Born Franky. John Henry born John Henry. And maybe we wants to widen and bust free. But no matter what we do we still caught. Me is me and you is you and he is he. We each one of us somehow caught all by ourself. I’m caught worse than you is. Because I’m Black, because I’m colored.”

— Carson McCullers

115. “Singer never knew just how much his friend understood of all the things he told him. But it did not matter.”

— Carson McCullers

116. “Because in some men it is in them to give up everything personal at some time, before it ferments and poisons – throw it to some human being or some human idea. They have to.”

— Carson McCullers

117. “She had always kept things to herself. That was one sure truth.”

— Carson McCullers

118. “Jake had begun to carry chalk in his pockets, also. He wrote brief sentences. He tried to word them so that a man would think.”

— Carson McCullers

119. “He was thinking that in nearly every person there was some special physical part kept always guarded.”

— Carson McCullers

120. “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

121. “The quiet room was too peaceful and comfortable to worry in.”

— Carson McCullers

122. “The Captain swallowed his capsules and lay down in the dark with pleasant anticipation. This quantity of the drug gave him a unique and voluptuous sensation; it was as though a great dark bird alighted on his chest, looked at him once with fierce, golden eyes, and stealthily enfolded him in his dark wings.”

— Carson McCullers

123. “Then when he had washed the ashtray and the glass he brought out a pistol from his pocket and put a bullet in his chest.”

— Carson McCullers

124. “Man does not make these natural resources – man only develops them, only uses them for work... How can a man own ground and space and sunlight and rain for crops?”

— Carson McCullers

125. “We live in the richest country in the world. There’s plenty and to spare for no man, woman, or child to be in want. And in addition to this our country was founded on what should have been a great, true principle – the freedom, equality, and rights of each individual. Huh! And what has come of that start? There are corporations worth billions of dollars – and hundreds of thousands of people who don’t get to eat.”

— Carson McCullers

126. “During these weeks there was a quality about Miss Amelia that many people noticed. She laughed often, with a deep ringing laugh, and her whistling had a sassy, tunefull trickery. She was forever trying out her strength, lifting up heavy objects or poking her tough biceps with her finger.”

— Carson McCullers

127. “Being mad is no good. Nothing we can do is any good. That’s the way it seems to me. All we can do is go around telling the truth.”

— Carson McCullers

128. “It all happened in a second. The three of them reached Baby at the same time. She lay crumpled down on the dirty sidewalk. Her skirt was over her head, showing her pink panties and her little white legs. Her hands were open – in one there was the prize from the candy and in the other the pocketbook. There was blood all over her hair ribbon and the top of her yellow curls. She was shot in the head and her face was turned down toward the ground.”

— Carson McCullers

129. “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 roller-coaster or the jukebox. It is no simple longing for the home town or 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.”

— Carson McCullers

130. “It was like that kid had been born knowing how to read. He was only in the second grade but he loved to read stories by himself – and he never asked anybody else to read to him.”

— Carson McCullers

131. “That was all he wanted for himself – to give to her. Biff’s mouth hardened. He had done nothing wrong but in him he felt a strange guilt. Why? The dark guilt in all men, unreckoned and without a name.”

— Carson McCullers

132. “The warring love and hatred – love for his people and hatred for the oppressors of his people – that left him exhausted and sick in spirit.”

— Carson McCullers

133. “What did he understand? Nothing. Where was he headed? Nowhere. What did he want? To know. What? A meaning. Why? A riddle.”

— Carson McCullers

134. “He could not understand the wild quiver of his heart, nor the following sense of recklessness and grace that lingered after she was gone.”

— Carson McCullers

135. “An army post in peacetime is a dull place. Things happen, but then they happen over and over again.”

— Carson McCullers

136. “There are times when a man’s greatest need is to have someone to love, some focal point for his diffused emotions. Also there are times when the irritations, disappointments, and fears of life, restless as spermatozoids, must be released in hate.”

— Carson McCullers

137. “It looks to me like everything has just walked off and left me.”

— Carson McCullers

138. “Frances wanted the whole world to die.”

— Carson McCullers

139. “Don’t you loathe it when doctors use the word ‘we’ when it applies only and solely to yourself?”

— Carson McCullers

140. “Today we are not put up on the platforms and sold at the courthouse square. But we are forced to sell our strength, our time, our souls during almost every hour that we live. We have been freed from one kind of slavery only to be delivered into another. Is this freedom?”

— Carson McCullers

141. “The eyes of his friend were moist and dark, and in them he saw the little rectangled pictures of himself that he had watched a thousand times.”

— Carson McCullers

142. “The mutual distrust between the men who were just awakened and those who were ending a long night gave everyone a feeling of estrangement.”

— Carson McCullers

143. “For forty years his mission was his life and his life was his mission. And yet all remained to be done and nothing was completed.”

— Carson McCullers

144. “She spoke and he could not understand. The sounds were distinct in his ear but they had no shape or meaning. It was as though his head were the prow of a boat and the sounds were water that broke on him and then flowed past. He felt he had to look behind to find the words already said.”

— Carson McCullers

145. “There was none of the quiet insolence about this man.”

— Carson McCullers

146. “It wasn’t like she was lonely and in fact – she had understood it all in every way except with her brain. Now she knew that she knew.”

— Carson McCullers

147. “The whole world was this music and she could not listen hard enough.”

— Carson McCullers

148. “I go all around and try to tell them. And they laugh. I can’t make them understand anything. No matter what I say I can’t seem to make them see the truth.”

— Carson McCullers

149. “She looked him full in the face with the most amazed expression. Even now he could not think of it without a shudder. And after a horribly long stare Alison had burst out laughing yes, laughing. She laughed so hard that she choked herself and someone had to beat her on the back. Finally she excused herself from the table. And all through that tormenting evening whenever he looked at her she gave him such a mocking smile.”

— Carson McCullers

150. “You are walking down a street and you meet somebody. Anybody. And you look at each other. And you are you. And he is him. Yet when you look at each other, the eyes make a connection. Then you go off one way. And he goes off another way. You go off into different parts of town, and maybe you never see each other again. Not in your whole life.”

— Carson McCullers