Quotes from Carson McCullers

El humo salía como adormecido de los rosados labios de él y se enredaba en una niebla gris por los lisos cabellos y la frente infantil de Frances

German lieder is creepy music. That's why I specialize in it.

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.

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?

fury is unleashed more freely against those you are most close to . . . so close that there is the trust that anger and ugliness will be forgiven.

Always he wanted to set her up to something, to give to her. And not only a sundae or some sweet to eat – but something real. 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.

You have a name and one thing after another happens to you, and you behave in various ways and do things, so that soon the name begins to have a meaning. Things have accumulated around the name.

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.

Have you ever seen any people that afterward you remembered more like a feeling than a picture?

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.

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.

Jeder hat seine Gefühle – wer es auch ist –, und keiner geht in ein Haus, wo er weiß, dass seine Gefühle verletzt werden. Du auch. Ich hab zu viele Male gesehen, wie weiße Leute dich verletzt haben. Ich weiß das.

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.

Hay ocasiones en que la mayor necesidad de un hombre es tener a quien amar, un punto en el que centrar sus emociones difusas.

and two pounds of fatback a

Death. Sometimes he could almost feel it in the room with him. He rocked to and fro in the chair. What did he understand? Nothing. Where was he headed? Nowhere. What did he want? To know. What? A meaning. Why? A riddle.

Because he had a mashed thumb like Ludie's?

Frankie watched the soft moths tremble and press against the window screen. The moths came every evening when the lamp on her desk was lighted. They came from out of the August night and fluttered and clung against the screen. To me it is the irony of fate, she said The way they come here. Those moths could fly anywhere. Yet they keep hanging around the windows of his house.

She was afraid because in the war they would not include her, and because the world seemed somehow separate from herself.

I think I have a vague idea what you were driving at, she said. We all of us somehow caught. We born this way and we don't know why. But we caught anyhow. I born Berenice. You born Frankie. 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. Is that what you was trying to say?

Love of another individual opens a new relation between the personality and the world. — Carson McCullers, The Mortgaged Heart: Selected Writings (Houghton Mifflin, 1971)

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

como no hablaba eso le hacía parecer superior.

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.