For fear is a primary source of evil. And when the question "Who am I?" recurs and is unanswered, then fear and frustration project a negative attitude. The bewildered soul can answer only: "Since I do not understand 'Who I am,' I only know what I am not." The corollary of this emotional incertitude is snobbism, intolerance and racial hate. The xenophobic individual can only reject and destroy, as the xenophobic nation inevitably makes war.

Carson McCullers

Categorized in : War Attitude Hate

We are torn between 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.

Carson McCullers

jukebox road-trip travel

The writer is by nature a dreamer - a conscious dreamer.

Carson McCullers

dreamer conscious

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

lonely long thinking

To know who you are, you have to have a place to come from.

Carson McCullers

who-you-are knows

The Heart is a lonely hunter with only one desire! To find some lasting comfort in the arms of anothers fire...driven by a desperate hunger to the arms of a neon light, the heart is a lonely hunter when there's no sign of love in sight!

Carson McCullers

lonely fire heart

Love is the bridge that leads from the I sense to the We, and there is a paradox about personal love. Love of another individual opens a new relation between the personality and the world. The lover responds in a new way to nature and may even write poetry. Love is affirmation; it motivates the yes responses and the sense of wider communication. Love casts out fear, and in the security of this togetherness we find contentment, courage. We no longer fear the age-old haunting questions: "Who am I?" "Why am I?" "Where am I going?" - and having cast out fear, we can be honest and charitable.

Carson McCullers

communication writing love-is

Falling in love is the easiest thing in the world. It's standing in love that matters.

Carson McCullers

falling-in-love matter love-is

It was better to be in a jail where you could bang the walls than in a jail you could not see.

Carson McCullers

bangs wall jail

How can the dead be truly dead when they still live in the souls of those who are left behind?

Carson McCullers

heart-is-a-lonely-hunter left-behind soul

The thinking mind is best controlled by the imagination.

Carson McCullers

imagination mind thinking

We are homesick most for the places we have never known.

Carson McCullers

jukebox homesick nostalgia

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?

Carson McCullers

soul running beautiful

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.

Carson McCullers

love-is two mean

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.

Carson McCullers

independent loneliness weather

We wander, question. But the answer waits in each separate heart - the answer of our own identity and the way by which we can master loneliness and feel that at last we belong.

Carson McCullers

loneliness waiting heart

Nothing is so musical as the sound of pouring bourbon for the first drink on a Sunday morning. Not Bach or Schubert or any of those masters.

Carson McCullers

sunday musical morning

Day and night she had drudged and struggled and thrown her soul into her work, and there was not much of her left over for anything else. Being human, she suffered from this lack and did what she could to make up for it. If she passed the evening bent over a table in the library and later declared that she had spent that time playing cards, it was as though she had managed to do both those things. Through the lies, she lived vicariously. The lies doubled the little of her existence that was left over from work and augmented the little rag end of her personal life.

Carson McCullers

soul night lying

The curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.

Carson McCullers

pain hate forever

The mind is like a richly woven tapestry in which the colors are distilled from the experiences of the senses, and the design drawn from the convolutions of the intellect.

Carson McCullers

medicine color philosophy

I´m a stranger in a strange land.

Carson McCullers

strange stranger land