239 Quotes by Carson McCullers

For we were thinking of freedom. That’s the word like a worm in my brain. Yes? No? How much? How little? The word is a signal for piracy and theft and cunning. We’ll be free and the smartest will then be able to enslave the others. But! But there is another meaning to the word. Of all words this one is the most dangerous. We who know must be wary. The word makes us feel good – in fact the word is a great ideal. But it’s with this ideal that the spiders spin their ugliest webs for us.

If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are gone, either write things worth reading or do things worth writing.

She did not know why she was sad, but because of this peculiar sadness, she began to realize she ought to leave the town.

You don’t know what it is to store up a lot of details and then come upon something real.

I got to wear blinders all the time so I won’t think sideways or in the past.

Jake had begun to carry chalk in his pockets, also. He wrote brief sentences. He tried to word them so that a man would think.

Don’t you loathe it when doctors use the word ‘we’ when it applies only and solely to yourself?

There are those who know and those who don’t know. And for every ten thousand who don’t know there’s only one who knows. That’s the miracle of all time – the fact that these millions know so much but don’t know this.

He fluttered his eyelids, so that they were like pale, trapped moths in his sockets.