The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

by Carson McCullers

It was always funny how many people could crowd in from nowhere when anything out of the ordinary happened.

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.

It is not more children we need but more chances for the ones already on the earth.

This summer she realized something about her Dad she had never known before. Up until then she had never thought about him as being a real separate person.

because he did not speak it made him seem superior.

For there was another thing bigger than the tiredness—and this was the strong true purpose.

He sees America as a crazy house. He sees how men have to rob their brothers in order to live. He sees children starving and women working sixty hours a week to get to eat.

They fought so that this could be a country where every man would be free and equal. Huh! And that meant every man was equal in the sight of Nature—with an equal chance. This didn’t mean that twenty per cent of the people were free to rob the other eighty per cent of the means to live.

All we can do is go around telling the truth. And as soon as enough of the don’t-knows have learned the truth then there won’t be any use for fighting.

This is one of the commandments Karl Marx left to us: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”’

Each man described the mute as he wished him to be.

Harry was a Pantheist. That was a religion, the same as Baptist or Catholic or Jew. Harry believed that after you were dead and buried you changed to plants and fire and dirt and clouds and water.

The song was sad as a question without words.

We live in the richest country in the world. There’s plenty and to spare for no man, woman, or child to be in want. And in addition to this our country was founded on what should have been a great, true principle—the freedom, equality, and rights of each individual. Huh! And what has come of that start? There are corporations worth billions of dollars—and hundreds of thousands of people who don’t get to eat.

The only solution is for the people to know. Once they know the truth they can be oppressed no longer.

And then in the night he would be happy in the knowledge that the day had been a day of purpose.

A deep feeling of satisfaction would be in him because the day was good.