Quotes from Carson McCullers

A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lillies of the swamp.

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

All we can do is go around telling the truth.

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

Love is the main generator of all good writing... Love, passion, compassion, are all welded together.

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.

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

The whole world was this symphony, and there was not enough of her to listen.

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

People felt themselves watching him even before they knew that there was anything different about him. His eyes made a person think that he heard things that no one else had ever heard, that he knew things no one had ever guessed before. He did not seem quite human.

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.

A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lillies of the swamp.

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.

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.

My advice to you is this. Do not attempt to stand alone. ...The most fatal thing a man can do is try to stand alone.

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

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.

They are the we of me.

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.

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.

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

The thinking mind is best controlled by the imagination.

It was like they waited to tell each other things that had never been told before. What she had to say was terrible and afraid. But what he would tell her was so true that it would make everything all right. Maybe it was a thing that could not be spoken with words or writing. Maybe he would have to let her understand this in a different way. That was the feeling she had with him.

But no value has been put on human life; it is given to us free and taken without being paid for. What is it worth? If you look around, at times the value may seem to be little or nothing at all. Often after you have sweated and tried and things are not better for you, there comes a feeling deep down in the soul that you are not worth much.