{"author":"Carson McCullers","author_id":"Carson+McCullers","total_quotes":58,"quotes":[{"text":"Wonderful music like this was the worst hurt there could be. The whole world was the symphony, and there was not enough of her to listen.","author":"Carson McCullers","tags":["art","humility","music","worship"],"id":6587,"author_id":"Carson+McCullers"},{"text":"I got to wear blinders all the time so I won't think sideways or in the past.","author":"Carson McCullers","tags":["focus","goal-setting","regret"],"id":21003,"author_id":"Carson+McCullers"},{"text":"Leonora Penderton feared neither man, beast, nor the devil; God she had never known.","author":"Carson McCullers","tags":["devil","fear","god"],"id":32806,"author_id":"Carson+McCullers"},{"text":"Why? Why was it that in cases of real love the one who is left does not more often follow the beloved by suicide? Only because the living must bury the dead? Because of the measured rites that must be fulfilled after a death? Because it is as though the one who is left steps for a time upon a stage and each second swells to an unlimited amount of time and he id watched by many eyes? Because there is a function he must carry out? Or perhaps, when there is love, the widowed must stay for the resurrection of the beloved - so that the one who has gone is not really dead, but grows and is created for a second time in the soul of the living? Why?","author":"Carson McCullers","tags":["death","grief","loss","mourning"],"id":53539,"author_id":"Carson+McCullers"},{"text":"The old bitterness came up in him and he did not have time to cogitate and push it down.","author":"Carson McCullers","tags":["bias","perspective"],"id":57588,"author_id":"Carson+McCullers"},{"text":"It wasn't like she was lonely and in fact – she had understood it all in every way except with her brain. Now she knew that she knew.","author":"Carson McCullers","tags":["instinct","intuition"],"id":74370,"author_id":"Carson+McCullers"},{"text":"First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons — but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which had lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer. So there is only one thing for the lover to do. He must house his love within himself as best he can; he must create for himself a whole new inward world — a world intense and strange, complete in himself. Let it be added here that this lover about whom we speak need not necessarily be a young man saving for a wedding ring — this lover can be man, woman, child, or indeed any human creature on this earth.Now, the beloved can also be of any description. The most outlandish people can be the stimulus for love. A man may be a doddering great-grandfather and still love only a strange girl he saw in the streets of Cheehaw one afternoon two decades past. The preacher may love a fallen woman. The beloved may be treacherous, greasy-headed, and given to evil habits. Yes, and the lover may see this as clearly as anyone else — but that does not affect the evolution of his love one whit. A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lilies of the swamp. A good man may be the stimulus for a love both violent and debased, or a jabbering madman may bring about in the soul of someone a tender and simple idyll. Therefore, the value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself.It is for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved. Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.","author":"Carson McCullers","tags":["unrequited-love"],"id":79390,"author_id":"Carson+McCullers"},{"text":"I feels sorrier for him than anybody I knows. I expect he done read more books than any white man in this town. He done read more books and he done worried about more things. He full of books and worrying. He done lost God and turned his back on religion. His troubles come down just to that.","author":"Carson McCullers","tags":["anxiety","education","faith","humility","knowledge","worry"],"id":85254,"author_id":"Carson+McCullers"},{"text":"They are the we of me.","author":"Carson McCullers","tags":["marriage"],"id":102985,"author_id":"Carson+McCullers"},{"text":"In one of their quarrels, they had begun calling each other Mister. And Misses., and since then they had never made it up enough to change it.","author":"Carson McCullers","tags":["bitterness","forgiveness","marriage","resentment"],"id":110350,"author_id":"Carson+McCullers"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":58,"pages":6,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}