Carson McCullers Quotes

Welcome to New York, where everybody's a stranger, and nobody is.

I walked around the block twice, passed 200 people and failed to see a human being.

My face, my self, what would they mean to anybody? Just another stiff. So this self of mine passes some other's self on the street - what do we have to say to each other? Hey there! Hi ya!That's about it. Nobody raises a hand. No one turns around to take another look.

I am like the fish in the aquarium, thinking in a different language, adapting to a life that’s not my natural habitat. I am the people in the other cars, each with his or her own story, but passing too quickly to be noticed or understood.

I felt as if I was the only person awake in a city of sleepwalkers. That's an illusion, of course. When you walk through a crowd of strangers it's next door to impossible not to imagine that they're all waxworks, but probably they're thinking just the same about you.

Strangers are an endangered species.

What have I to do with millions [of people]? The eighty I know despise me.

People come and people go, moving fast and moving slow, I'm in a crowd and yet I'm all alone.

Loneliness in a crowd of people was the worst kind of loneliness, but she couldn't help it.

A hotel, he told me, was a big house where a lot of people lived and ate and slept, but no one knew each other. He said that described most families in the outside world.

living in Los Angeles was like being an extra in a movie that was starring other people entirely.

There's this thing of you can live in a city and be completely alone, not notice anything going on around you.

The man in the street is always a stranger.

In talking, shyness and timidity distort the very meaning of my words. I don't pretend to know anybody well. People are like shadows to me and I am like a shadow.

I meet so many people, but I don't know anybody.

All these cities I go to, I never see them. They may be the most beautiful places in the world, but I'll just usually go to the nearest bar. I need a couple of hours by myself.

A lot of the time in modern Britain, certainly in urban life, we barely have any contact at all with the people around us.

I stand on the end platform of the tram and am completely unsure of my footing in this world, in this town, in my family. Not even casually could I indicate any claims that I might rightly advance in any direction. I have not even any defense to offer for standing on this platform, holding on to this strap, letting myself be carried along by this tram, nor for the people who give way to the tram or walk quietly along or stand gazing into shop windows. Nobody asks me to put up a defense, indeed, but that is irrelevant.

But 'midst the crowd, the hum, the shock of men, To hear, to see, to feel, and to possess, And roam along, the world's tired denizen, With none who bless us, none whom we can bless.

More and more I feel like a letter—deposited here, collected there. But a letter addressed to no one.

A lone walker is both present and detached, more than an audience but less than a participant. Walking assuages or legitimizes this alienation.

It suddenly seemed to me that I was lonely, that every one was forsaking me and going away from me. Of course, any one is entitled to ask who "every one" was. For though I had been living almost eight years in Petersburg I had hardly an acquaintance. But what did I want with acquaintances? I was acquainted with all Petersburg as it was.

In Moscow you sit in a huge room at a restaurant; you know no one and no one knows you, and at the same time you don't feel a stranger. But here you know everyone and everyone knows you, and yet you are a stranger - a stranger... A stranger, and lonely...

If I walk on the street, if I go to a restaurant, people come to me and say: "Can we take a photo together? Can you give me your autograph?" They would bring their expensive Armani or Prada wallet to sign. Other people who are desperate show me a photo of their dead daughter and ask: Can you support me? I tell them: How can I? Morally, of course, I sympathize with you. But I cannot support you and you cannot support me. This is the condition of this society. We are separated.

He was slumped in the back, gazing out of the window, as though his parents were two people who had picked him up hitchhiking, connected to him merely by chance and proximity.