Carson McCullers Quotes

Time, you old gypsy man, will you not stay, put up your caravan just for one day?

One feels that the past stays the way you left it, whereas the present is in constant movement; it's unstable all around you.

Yesterday's rose endures in its name, we hold empty names.

This is the time to remember cause it will not last forever. These are the days to hold onto cause we won't although we'll want to.

It's about moments in life that are great but don't last. They don't go on, but you always have the memory and they have an effect on you. That's what I was thinking about.

There are many things worth telling that are not quite narrative. And eternity itself possesses no beginning, middle or end. Fossils, arrowheads, castle ruins, empty crosses: from the Parthenon to the Bo Tree to a grown man's or woman's old stuffed bear, what moves us about many objects is not what remains but what has vanished. There comes a time, thanks to rivers, when a few beautiful old teeth are all that remain of the two-hundred-foot spires of life we call trees. There comes a river, whose current is time, that does a similar sculpting in the mind.

Since life itself is uncertain, nothing which has life for its basis can boast much stability.

We're just a bubble in a boiling pot.

Some of the greatest moments in life come from moments that are incomplete.

The things that have come into being change continually. The man with a good memory remembers nothing because he forgets nothing.

But where are the snows of yester year?

The foundations of our lives are far more fragile than we think. So we are severely shaken when life turns out to have a will of its own.

Yesterday's just a memory, tomorrow is never what it's supposed to be.

Our lives feel like these epochs, but really, we are dust in the wind.

Yes, you can lose somebody overnight, yes, your whole life can be turned upside down. Life is short. It can come and go like a feather in the wind.

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

As the blessings of health and fortune have a beginning, so they must also find an end. Everything rises but to fall, and increases but to decay.

Nothing can ever happen twice. In consequence, the sorry fact is that we arrive here improvised and leave without the chance to practice.

Our lives are a sequence of things. When we're alive, they're continuing, just as my words now are an improvisation. So the idea of 30 years is actually quite nebulous. It's impossible to encapsulate it. All you can do is go: 'what next?'

Without continuity, men would become like flies in summer.

For all I know, I am beginning with the ending. My page one can wind up a year later as page two hundred, if it's still even around.

You can never figure out what the future sounds like. As soon as you make it, it's the past.

Anything that's given to you can be taken away from you at any time.

Mankind is a dream of a shadow.

Each new Clarice, compact as a living body with its smells and its breath, shows off, like a gem, what remains of the ancient Clarices, fragmentary and dead.