There’s nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book.
—Carson McCullers
Topics: Existence
All men are lonely. But sometimes it seems to me that we Americans are the loneliest of all. Our hunger for foreign places and new ways has been with us almost like a national disease. Our literature is stamped with a quality of longing and unrest, and our writers have been great wanderers.
—Carson McCullers
Topics: Loneliness
It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With Americans, it is a national trait, as native to us as the roller-coaster or the jukebox. It is no simple longing for the home town or country of our birth. The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.
—Carson McCullers
Topics: Remembrance
While time, the endless idiot, runs screaming round the world.
—Carson McCullers
Topics: Time Management, Time
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.
—Carson McCullers
Topics: Thinking
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Cynthia Ozick American Novelist, Essayist
Susan Sontag American Writer, Philosopher
Kate Millet American Feminist, Writer, Sculptor
Evelyn Scott American Novelist
Dorothy Bryant American Novelist
Joyce Carol Oates American Novelist
Betty Smith American Author
Zora Neale Hurston American Novelist
Carrie Fisher American Actress
Marjorie Kellogg American Author