Quotes from Carson McCullers

The joy made him feel like a drunken man. To teach and exhort and explain to his people--and to have them understand. That was the best of all. To speak the truth and be attended.

In one of their quarrels, they had begun calling each other Mister. and Misses., and since then they had never made it up enough to change it.

You think out everything in your brain. While us rather talk from something in our hearts that has been there for a long time. That's one of them differences.

The loneliness in him was so keen that he was filled with terror. Usually he had a pint of bootleg white lightning. He drank the raw liquor and by daylight he was warm and relaxed.

She had always kept things to herself. That was one sure truth.

Singer never knew just how much his friend understood of all the things he told him. But it did not matter.

They start at the wrong end of love. They begin at the climax. Can you wonder why it is so miserable?

It was the year Frankie thought about the world. And she did not see it as a round school globe, with the countries neat and different-colored. She thought of the world as huge and cracked and loose and turning a thousand miles an hour.

By the moonlight he watched his wife for the last time. His hand sought the adjacent flesh and sorrow paralleled desire in the immense complexity of love.

Son, do you know how love should be begun? The boy sat small and listening and still. Slowly he shook his head. The old man leaned closer and whispered: A tree. A rock. A cloud.

The world is certainty a sudden place.

People, unless they are nilly-willy or very sick, cannot be taken into the hands and be changed overnight into somthing more worth-while and profitable.

April that year came sudden and still, and the green of the trees was a wild bright green. The pale wistarias bloomed all over town, and silently the blossoms shattered. There was something about the green trees and the flowers of April that made Frankie sad. She did not know why she was sad, but because of this peculiar sadness, she began to realize she ought to leave the town.

I know, but what is it all about? People loose and at the same time caught. Caught and loose. All these people and you don't know what joins them up. There's bound to be some sort of reason and connection. Yet somehow I can't seem to name it. I don't know." "If you did you would be God," said Berenice. "Didn't you know that?

He felt as though he had swelled up to the size of a giant. The love in him made his chest a dynamo, and he wanted to shout so that his voice could be heard throughout the town. He wanted to fall upon the floor and call out in a giant voice.

He was like a man who had served a term in prison or had been to Harvard College or had left for a long time with foreigners in South America. He was like a person who had been somewhere that other people are not likely to go or had done something that others are not apt to do.

I go all around and try to tell them. And they laugh. I can't make them understand anything. No matter what I say I can't seem to make them see the truth.

It all happened in a second. The three of them reached Baby at the same time. She lay crumpled down on the dirty sidewalk. Her skirt was over her head, showing her pink panties and her little white legs. Her hands were open—in one there was the prize from the candy and in the other the pocketbook. There was blood all over her hair ribbon and the top of her yellow curls. She was shot in the head and her face was turned down toward the ground.

Then when he had washed the ashtray and the glass he brought out a pistol from his pocket and put a bullet in his chest.

It wasn't like she was lonely and in fact – she had understood it all in every way except with her brain. Now she knew that she knew.

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 this house.

But listen! Wherever you look there's meanness and corruption. This room, this bottle of grape wine, these fruits in the basket, are all products of profit and loss. A fellow can't live without giving his passive acceptance to meanness. Somebody wears his tail to a frazzle for every mouthful we eat and every stitch we wear—and nobody seems to know. Everybody is blind, dumb, and blunt-headed—stupid and mean.' Jake

You mind Ralph, she called back to Bubber. Mind the gnats don't sit on his eyelids.

La mente es como un tapiz ricamente tejido en el que los colores son dados por la experiencia de los sentimientos y el diseño por las operaciones del intelecto. La mente del soldado Williams se hallaba impregnada de diversos colores de extraños tonos, pero carecía de diseño y forma.