Carson McCullers Quotes

To have passed through life and never experienced solitude is to have never known oneself. To have never known oneself is to have never known anyone.

Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone.

Millions of people live their entire lives without finding themselves. But it is something I must do.

I have been trying, for some time now, to find dignity in my loneliness. I have been finding this hard to do. It is easier, of course, to find dignity in one's solitude. Loneliness is solitude with a problem.

In a field, I am the absence of field. In a crowd, I am the absence of crowd. In a dream, I am the absence of dream. But I don't want to live as an absence. I move to keep things whole. Because sometimes I feel drunk on positivity. Sometimes I feel amazement at the tangle of words and lives, and I want to be a part of that tangle.

You must walk alone to find your soul.

I have to find a place for my own. I have to search for my own happiness.

Being myself didn't work. Being someone else didn't work. Maybe I just wasn't meant to have friends.

You can spend your life competing in a world that talks too loud / You can lose your own direction getting lost among the crowd / Confusion - is it any wonder that the road ahead's not clear / Well you can try too hard to find it now I realise it's here

I'm still trying to express my truth, my place in the world, my belief.

Nobody can teach me who I am. You can describe parts of me, but who I am - and what I need - is something I have to find out myself.

And so I learned what solitude really was. It was raw material - awesome, malleable,older than men or worlds or water. And it was merciless - for it let a man become precisely what he alone made of himself.

I'm trying to find myself as a person, sometimes that's not easy to do. Millions of people live their entire lives without finding themselves. But it is something I must do. The best way for me to find myself as a person is to prove to myself that I am an actress.

She wasn't tracking down her father to learn more about him. She was tracking him down to learn more about herself.

If a man is ever to find out who he is and what he is here for, he has got to take that journey for himself. He has got to get his heart back.

I'm not interested in nostalgia; I'm interested in who I am.

I'm on this search trying to figure out exactly who I am and what I have to say to people.

The real rub is finding that authentic self and it's not something that's going to come to you overnight.

Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone: it is the opening of an impalpable, transparent wall - that of our consciousness - between the world and ourselves.

It's not about finding a home so much as finding yourself.

I think everyone is trying to figure out who they are and their own thing.

Life is for each man a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.

It took me 30 years to figure out who I really am, as a person, and who I want to surround myself with. I was very much the kind of person who would just meld in with whatever group I was near.

What I can say is that all my characters are searching for their souls, because they are my mirrors. I'm someone who is constantly trying to understand my place in the world, and literature is the best way that I found in order to see myself.

I think, no matter who you are, at some point in your life you've probably said, 'OK, well, who am I, and where do I fit in?'