Carson McCullers Quotes

I want affection and tenderness desperately, but there's something in me that prevents me from handing it out.

You can blame your ugliness for keeping people at bay, when in reality you're crippled by the thought of letting another person close enough to popentially scar you even more deeply. You can tell yourself that it's safer to love someone who will never really love you back, because you can't lose someone you never had.

Ugh! Why couldn’t anyone ever trust her? She wasn’t a two-year-old. If her kindness killed her, then she was better off dead than living a cold, unfeeling life where she misered up all her feelings and possessions.’ (Sunshine)

From this haunting feeling of being not wanted, which remained a recurrent haunt through life, I found two ways of escape, both of which in changing form also persisted. One was the invention of gods, the other was personal efficiency in work.

The only way I can describe the extent of my anxiety is to say that I felt as if I were pregnant with a rock.

I think there’s a lot of threshold weeping. Like, am I doing this? Am I really wearing this out in the world? My daughter is very much like that. She will put clothes on and her clothes just make her beside herself. They make her so sad sometimes. And you do realize you feel betrayed sometimes by your own clothing. You put something on that usually protects you and makes you OK, and sometimes you’re just not fit for the world and even your best pants can’t overcome that feeling for you.

I have no self-respect. But can a man of acute sensibility respect himself at all?

That was the dirty secret associated with her past. Not that she'd been abused but that somehow she felt that she deserved it because she'd let it happen. Even now, it shamed her, and there were times when she felt hideously ugly, as though the scars that had been left behind were visible to everyone.

On a day-to-day basis, you get tired of waiting to be accepted. In show business, someone else has to say that you're good or that you're worth going to see or worth taping a show. There's a lot of pain here. There's a lot of pain inside. I'm a sad, crying-on-the-inside kind of clown.

Thanks to Granna, Werner and Walter had grown up to be highly functioning, productive citizens - but if you were to ask Walter, Werner had a far easier time of it and lived his life with the sanctified nonchalance of those who will do anything to avoid dissecting their souls.

At first he thought he felt bad because he was afraid of leading an army, but it wasn't true. He knew he'd make a good commander. He felt himself wanting to cry. He hadn't cried since the first few days of homesickness after he got here. He tried to put a name on the feeling that put a lump in his throat and made him sob silently, however much he tried to hold it down. He bit down on his hand to stop the feeling, to replace it with pain. It didn't help.

He couldn't bear to live, but he couldn't bear to die. He couldn't bear the thought of he making love to someone else, but neither could he bear the absence of the thought. And as for the note, he couldn't bear to keep it, but he couldn't bear to destroy it either.

I don't know why it's difficult to admit that I miss you.

Depression is very bad illness. This will be the toughest fight of my life.

I almost said, you're not broken, you're just going through something. But i couldn't. She knew. There was something terribly wrong with her, all the way inside. She was like a big diamond with a dead spot in the middle. I was supposed to breathe life into that dead spot, but it hadn't worked.

But day after day of depression, the kind that doesn’t seem to merit carting me off to a hospital but allows me to sit here on this stoop in summer camp as if I were normal, day after day wearing down everybody who gets near me. My behavior seems, somehow, not acute enough for them to know what to do with me, though I’m just enough of a mess to be driving everyone around me crazy.

The soul has more diseases than the body.

It is not humiliating to be unhappy. Physical suffering is sometimes humiliating, but the suffering of being cannot be, it is life.

But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defensless that I couldn't do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get.

He'd come back, all open and helpless, and I suppose that's what won her around in the end. But it was so sad, because it was being himself that he found so difficult to cope with.

For a second I think about how easy it would be to pass back to the other side, to walk straight into the laboratories and offer myself up to the surgeons. You were right; I was wrong. Get it out.

The silence is perfect, and yet a torment.

Hence, viper thoughts, that coil around my mind,Reality's dark dream!I turn from you, and listen to the wind,Which long has raved unnoticed.

I think Nancy Reagan felt so judged all the time and she felt so unlovable.

No one's perfect," I whisper. "It doesn't work that way. One bad thing goes away, and another bad thing replaces it." I traded cowardice for cruelty; I traded weakness for ferocity.