CARSON MCCULLERS

The theme is the theme of humiliation, which is the square root of sin, as opposed to the freedom from humiliation, and love, which is the square root of wonderful.

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.

I live with the people I create and it has always made my essential loneliness less keen.

There's nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book.

There are corporations worth billions of dollars—and hundreds of thousands of people who don't get to eat.

The thinking mind is best controlled by the imagination.

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.

Because in some men it is in them to give up everything personal at some time, before it ferments and poisons--throw it to some human being or some human idea. They have to.

Don't you loathe it when doctors use the word 'we' when it applies only and solely to yourself?

There was hope in him, and soon perhaps the outline of his journey would take form.

I´m a stranger in a strange land.

Death is the great gamer with a sleeve of tricks.

Comparing the Brooklyn that I know with Manhattan is like comparing a comfortable and complacent duenna to her more brilliant and neurotic sister.

Passion is more important than justice.

But the hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes. The heart of a hurt child can shrink so that forever afterward it is hard and pitted as the seed of a peach. Or again, the heart of such a child may fester and swell until it is a misery to carry within the body, easily chafed and hurt by the most ordinary things.

Love is the main generator of all good writing... Love, passion, compassion, are all welded together.

Next to music beer was best.

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.

But the hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes.

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.

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.

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

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.

Resentment is the most precious flower of poverty.

The seed of the idea is developed by both labor and the unconscious, and the struggle that goes on between them.