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Southerners are the more lonely and spiritually estranged, I think, because we have lived so long in an artificial social system that we insisted was natural and right and just - when all along we knew it wasn't.

Carson McCullers

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Carson McCullers
Age: 50 †
Born: 1917
Born: February 19
Died: 1967
Died: September 29
Film Writer
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Writer
Columbus
Georgia
Lula Carson Smith
Carson McCullers
Thinking
Wasn
Southerner
System
Insisted
Knew
Spiritually
Natural
Artificial
Social
Racism
Right
Lonely
Long
Lived
Southerners
Think
Along
Estranged

More quotes by Carson McCullers

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Doctors, by God washing their hands, looking out windows, fiddling with dreadful things while you are stretched out on a table or half undressed on a chair.
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I'm not explaining this right. What happened was this. There were these beautiful feelings and loose little pleasures inside me. And this woman was something like an assembly line for my soul. I run these little pieces of myself through her and I come out complete. Now do you follow me?
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I think we look for the differences in people because it makes us less lonely.
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She was afraid of these things that made her suddenly wonder who she was, and what she was going to be in the world, and why she was standing at that minute, seeing a light, or listening, or staring up into the sky: alone.
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Passion is more important than justice.
Carson McCullers
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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.
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A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lillies of the swamp.
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But all the time-no matter what she was doing-there was music.
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The writer by nature of his profession is a dreamer and a conscious dreamer. He must imagine, and imagination takes humility, love and great courage. How can you create a character without live and the struggle that goes with love?
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Maybe when people longed for a thing that bad the longing made them trust in anything that might give it to them.
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A writer soon discovers he has no single identity but lives the lives of all the people he creates and his weathers are independent of the actual day around him. I live with the people I create and it has always made my essential loneliness less keen.
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How can the dead be truly dead when they still live in the souls of those who are left behind?
Carson McCullers
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The human heart is a lonely hunter-but the search for us southerners is more anguished.
Carson McCullers
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I am not meant to be alone and without you who understands.
Carson McCullers
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And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being loved is intolerable to many.
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Some men are heroes by nature in that they will give all that is in them without regard to the effort or to the personal returns.
Carson McCullers
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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.
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Death is the great gamer with a sleeve of tricks.
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The people dreamed and fought and slept as much as ever. And by habit they shortened their thoughts so that they would not wander out into the darkness beyond tomorrow.
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Next to music beer was best.
Carson McCullers