Quotes from Carson McCullers

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.

Resentment is the most precious flower of poverty.

I got to wear blinders all the time so I won't think sideways or in the past.

Coming down was the hardest part of any climbing.

And by habit they shortened their thoughts so that they would not wander out into the darkness beyond tomorrow.

Us going to have a cup of coffee. Then maybe it all won't seem so bad.

And why did everyone persist in thinking the mute was exactly as they wanted him to be--when most likely it was all a very queer mistake?... In the battling tumult of voices he alone was silent.

The human heart is a lonely hunter-but the search for us southerners is more anguished.....

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

For you see, when us people who know run into each other that's an event. It almost never happens. Sometimes we meet each other and neither guesses that the other is one who knows. That's a bad thing. It's happened to me a lot of times. But you see there are so few of us.

In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together.

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.

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.

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

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

She was at the age when she looked as much like an overgrown boy as a girl. And on that subject why was it that the smartest people mostly missed that point? By nature all people are of both sexes. So that marriage and the bed is not all by any means. The proof? Real youth and old age. Because often old men's voices grow high and reedy and the take on a mincing walk. And old women sometimes grow fat and their voices get rough and deep and the grow dark little mustaches.

She decided to donate blood to the Red Cross; she wanted to donate a quart a week and her blood would be in the veins of Australians and Fighting French and Chinese, all over the whole world, and it would be as though she were close kin to all of these people. She could hear the army doctors saying that the blood of Frankie Addams was the reddest and the strongest blood that they had ever known.

Wonderful music like this was the worst hurt there could be. The whole world was the symphony, and there was not enough of her to listen.

There was a hollow in her chest, but at the bottom of this emptiness a heavy weight pressed down and bruised her stomach, so that she felt sick.

I had no power of how and when to remember her. You think you can put up a kind of shield. But remembering don't come to a man face forward—it corners around sideways. I was at the mercy of everything I saw and heard. Suddenly instead of me combing the countryside to find her, she begun to chase me around in my very soul. She chasing me mind you! And in my soul.

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.

But now no music was in her mind. That was a funny thing. It was like she was shut out from the inside room. Sometimes a quick little tune would come and go - but she never went into the inside room with music like she used to do. It was like she was too tense. Or maybe because it was like the store took all her energy and time . . . She wanted to stay in the inside room but she didn't know how. It was like the inside room was locked somewhere away from her. A very hard thing to understand.

That was the best of all. To speak the truth and be attended.

I wish I was somebody else except me.