"Next to music beer was best."
— Carson McCullers (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter)

"First of all, 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. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which had lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer. So there is only one thing for the lover to do. He must house his love within himself as best he can; he must create for himself a whole new inward world — a world intense and strange, complete in himself. Let it be added here that this lover about whom we speak need not necessarily be a young man saving for a wedding ring — this lover can be man, woman, child, or indeed any human creature on this earth.

Now, the beloved can also be of any description. The most outlandish people can be the stimulus for love. A man may be a doddering great-grandfather and still love only a strange girl he saw in the streets of Cheehaw one afternoon two decades past. The preacher may love a fallen woman. The beloved may be treacherous, greasy-headed, and given to evil habits. Yes, and the lover may see this as clearly as anyone else — but that does not affect the evolution of his love one whit. A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lilies of the swamp. A good man may be the stimulus for a love both violent and debased, or a jabbering madman may bring about in the soul of someone a tender and simple idyll. Therefore, the value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself.

It is for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved. Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And 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

"Maybe when people longed for a thing that bad the longing made them trust in anything that might give it to them."
— Carson McCullers (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter)

"And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being loved is intolerable to many."
— Carson McCullers (The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories)

"the way i need you is a loneliness i cannot bear."
— Carson McCullers (The Heart is a Lonely Hunter)

"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 (A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud)

"I think we look for the differences in people because it makes us less lonely."
— Carson McCullers

"They are the we of me."
— Carson McCullers (The Member of the Wedding: A Play)

"It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With Americans, it is a national trait, as native to us as the roller-coaster or the jukebox. It is no simple longing for the home town or country of our birth. The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a 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

"How can the dead be truly dead when they still live in the souls of those who are left behind?"
— Carson McCullers (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter)

"But all the time-no matter what she was doing-there was music."
— Carson McCullers

"She wished there was some place where she could go to hum it out loud. Some kind of music was too private to sing in a house cram fall of people. It was funny, too, how lonesome a person could be in a crowded house."
— Carson McCullers (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter)

"All we can do is go around telling the truth."
— Carson McCullers (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter)

"while time, the endless idiot, runs screaming around the world"
— Carson McCullers

"I want - I want - I want - was all that she could think about - but just what this real want was she did not know."
— Carson McCullers (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter)

"Listen,” F. Jasmine said. “What I’ve been trying to say is this. Doesn’t it strike you as strange that I am I, and you are you? I am F. Jasmine Addams. And you are Berenice Sadie Brown. And we can look at each other, and touch each other, and stay together year in and year out in the same room. Yet always I am I, and you are you. And I can’t ever be anything else but me, and you can ever be anything else but you. Have you ever thought of that? And does it seem to you strange? "
— Carson McCullers (Member of the Wedding)

"... and we are not alone in this slavery. there are millions of others throughout the world, of all colors and races and creeds. this we must remember. there are many of our people who hate the poor of the white race, and they hate us. the people in this town living by the river who work in the mills. people who are almost as much in need as we are ourselves. this hatred is a great evil, and no good can ever come from it... the injustice of need must bring us all together and not separate us. we must remember that we all make the things of this earth of value because of labor."
— Carson McCullers (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter)

" But look what the Church has done to Jesus during the last two thousand years. What they have made of Him. How they have turned every word He spoke for their own vile ends. Jesus would be framed and in jail if he was living today."
— Carson McCullers (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter)

"This was her, Mick Kelly, walking in the daytime and by herself at night. In the hot sun and in the dark with all the plans and feelings. This music was her—the real plain her...This music did not take a long time or a short time. It did not have anything to do with time going by at all. She sat with her arms around her legs, biting her salty knee very hard. The whole world was this symphony, and there was not enough of her to listen... Now that it was over there was only her heart beating like a rabbit and this terrible hurt."
— Carson McCullers (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter)

"The closest thing to being cared for is to care for someone else."
— Carson McCullers (The Square Root of Wonderful)

"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."
— Carson McCullers (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter)

"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

"“The enjoyment of a spectacle is something you have never known,” he said.
Her voice was tired. “That fellow downstairs is a spectacle, all right, and a circus too. But I’m through putting up with him.”
“Hell, the man don’t mean anything to me. He’s no relative or buddy of mine. But you don’t know what it is to store up a whole lot of details and then come upon something real.” He turned on the hot water and quickly began to shave.

"
— Carson McCullers

"The thinking mind is best controlled by the imagination."
— Carson McCullers (Illumination and Night Glare: The Unfinished Autobiography of Carson McCullers)

"The most outlandish people can be the stimulus for love...A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lilies of the swamp. A good man may be the stimulus for a love both violent and debased, or a jabbering madman may bring about in the soul of someone a tender and simple idyll. Therefore, the value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself.

It is for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved. Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many. "
— Carson McCullers