Quotes from Carson McCullers

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.

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.

Next to music beer was best.

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

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

Writing, for me, is a search for God.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

While Time, The endless idiot, runs screaming round the world.

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.

Imagination takes humility, love and great courage.

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.

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.

I was like a cat always climbing the wrong tree.

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?

Maybe when people longed for a thing that bad the longing made them trust in anything that might give it to them.