Quotes from Carson McCullers

The love she felt was so hard that she had to squeeze him to her until her arms were tired.

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 your name.

It was almost three o'clock, the most stagnant hour in the day or night.

But you haven't never loved God nor even nair person. You hard and tough as cowhide. But just the same I knows you. This afternoon you going to roam all over the place without never being satisfied. You going to traipse all around like you haves to find something lost. You going to work yourself up with excitement. Your heart going to beat hard enough to kill you because you don't love and don't have peace. And then some day you going to bust loose and be ruined.

You mean,' Captain Penderton said, 'that any fulfilment obtained at the expense of normalcy is wrong, and should not be allowed to bring happiness. In short, it is better, because it is morally honourable, for the square peg to keep scraping around the round hole rather than to discover and use the unorthodox square that would fit?'…'I don't agree

To the lost, transfixed among the self-inflicted ruins, All that is non-air (if this indeed is not deception) Is agony immobilized. While Time, The endless idiot, runs screaming round the world.

Any form of art can only develop by means of single mutations by individual creators. If only traditional conventions are used an art will die, and the widening of an art form is bound to seem strange at first, and awkward. Any growing thing must go through awkward stages. The creator who is misunderstood because of his breach of convention may say to himself, 'I seem strange to you, but anyway I am alive.

He nearly always put his hand on his friend's arm and looked for a second into his face before leaving him.

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.

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

Maybe when people longed for a thing that bad the longing made them trust in anything that might give it to them . . . She thought a long time and kept hitting her thighs with her fists. Her face fell like it was scattered in pieces and she could not keep it straight. The feeling was a whole lot worse than being hungry for any dinner, yet it was like that. I want - I want - I want - was all that she could think about - but just what this real want was she did not know.

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

He was like a man who had served a term in prison or had been to Harvard College or had lived for a long time with foreigners in South America.

in her heart it didn't give her near the same feeling that music did. Nothing was really as good as music.

But the music did not come again. The tune was left broken, unfinished. And the drawn tightness she could no longer stand. She felt she must do something wild and sudden that never had been done before. She hit herself on the head with her fist, but that did not help any at all. And she began to talk aloud, although at first she paid no attention to her own words and did not know in advance what she would say.

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 on 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.

With her it was like there was two places—the inside room and the outside room.

A person can't pick up they children and just squeeze them to which-a-way they wants them to be.

Sometimes he thought that he had talked so much in the years before to his children and they had understood so little that now there was nothing at all to say.

It looks to me like everything has just walked off and left me

Why did he go onward? Why did he not rest here upon the bottom of utmost humiliation and for a while take his content? But he went onward.

Leonora Penderton feared neither man, beast, nor the devil; God she had never known.

She did not know why she was sad, but because of this peculiar sadness, she began to realize she ought to leave the town.

After such mornings he returned to the show with relief. It eased him to push through the crowds of people. The noise, the rank stinks, the shouldering contact of human flesh soothed his jangled nerves.