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Her Face Felt Like It Was Scattered In Pieces And She Could Not Keep It Straight. The Feeling Was A Whole Lot Worse Than Being Hungry For Any Dinner, Yet It Was Like That. I Want--i Want--i Want--was All That She Could Think About--but Just What This Real Want Was She Did No Know.

-Carson McCullers

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Her Face Felt Like

Carson McCullers

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Her Face Felt Like It Was Scattered In Pieces And She Could Not Keep It Straight. The Feeling Was A Whole Lot Worse Than Being Hungry For Any Dinner, Yet It Was Like That. I Want--i Want--i Want--was All That She Could Think About--but Just What This Real Want Was She Did No Know.

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The Music Left Only This Bad Hurt In Her, And A Blankness. She Could Not Remember Any Of The Symphony, Not Even The Last Few Notes. She Tried To Remember, But No Sound At All Came To Her. Now That It Was Over There Was Only Her Heart Like A Rabbit And This Terrible Hurt.

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People Felt Themselves Watching Him Even Before They Knew That There Was Anything Different About Him. His Eyes Made A Person Think That He Heard Things That No One Else Had Ever Heard, That He Knew Things No One Had Ever Guessed Before. He Did Not Seem Quite Human.

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Once You Have Lived With Another, It Is A Great Torture To Have To Live Alone.

But Look What The Church Has Done To Jesus During The Last Two Thousand Years. What They Have Made Of Him. How They Have Turned Every Word He Spoke For Their Own Vile Ends. Jesus Would Be Framed And In Jail If He Was Living Today.

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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.

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In His Face There Came To Be A Brooding Peace That Is Seen Most Often In The Faces Of The Very Sorrowful Or The Very Wise. But Still He Wandered Through The Streets Of The Town, Always Silent And Alone.

Justice Itself Is A Chimera, A Delusion. Justice Is Not A Flat Yardstick, Applied In Equal Measure To An Equal Situation.

After The First Establishment Of Identity There Comes The Imperative Need To Lose This New-found Sense Of Separateness And To Belong To Something Larger And More Powerful Than The Weak, Lonely Self. The Sense Of Moral Isolation Is Intolerable To Us.

Owing To The Fact He Was A Mute They Were Able To Give Him All The Qualities They Wanted Him To Have.

I Do Not Have Any Home. So Why Should I Be Homesick?

They Are The We Of Me.

Day And Night She Had Drudged And Struggled And Thrown Her Soul Into Her Work, And There Was Not Much Of Her Left Over For Anything Else. Being Human, She Suffered From This Lack And Did What She Could To Make Up For It. If She Passed The Evening Bent Over A Table In The Library And Later Declared That She Had Spent That Time Playing Cards, It Was As Though She Had Managed To Do Both Those Things. Through The Lies, She Lived Vicariously. The Lies Doubled The Little Of Her Existence That Was Left Over From Work And Augmented The Little Rag End Of Her Personal Life.

Death Is The Great Gamer With A Sleeve Of Tricks.

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.

His Own Life Seemed So Solitary, A Fragile Column Supporting Nothing Amidst The Wreckage Of The Years.

The Writer By Nature Of His Profession Is A Dreamer And A Conscious Dreamer. He Must Imagine, And Imagination Takes Humility, Love And Great Courage. How Can You Create A Character Without Live And The Struggle That Goes With Love?

Next To Music Beer Was Best.

For You See, When Us People Who Know Run Into Each Other That's An Event. It Almost Never Happens. Sometimes We Meet Each Other And Neither Guesses That The Other Is One Who Knows. That's A Bad Thing. It's Happened To Me A Lot Of Times. But You See There Are So Few Of Us.

Sometimes This Fellow's Music Was Like Little Colored Pieces Of Crystal Candy, And Other Times It Was The Softest, Saddest Thing She Had Ever Imagined About.

This Was Her, Mick Kelly, Walking In The Daytime And By Herself At Night. In The Hot Sun And In The Dark With All The Plans And Feelings. This Music Was Her—the Real Plain Her...this Music Did Not Take A Long Time Or A Short Time. It Did Not Have Anything To Do With Time Going By At All. She Sat With Her Arms Around Her Legs, Biting Her Salty Knee Very Hard. The Whole World Was This Symphony, And There Was Not Enough Of Her To Listen... Now That It Was Over There Was Only Her Heart Beating Like A Rabbit And This Terrible Hurt.

But No Value Has Been Put On Human Life; It Is Given To Us Free And Taken Without Being Paid For. What Is It Worth? If You Look Around, At Times The Value May Seem To Be Little Or Nothing At All. Often After You Have Sweated And Tried And Things Are Not Better For You, There Comes A Feeling Deep Down In The Soul That You Are Not Worth Much.

The Way I Need You Is A Loneliness I Cannot Bear.

Maybe When People Longed For A Thing That Bad The Longing Made Them Trust In Anything That Might Give It To Them.

The Closest Thing To Being Cared For Is To Care For Someone Else.

Some Men Are Heroes By Nature In That They Will Give All That Is In Them Without Regard To The Effort Or To The Personal Returns.

What Are The Sources Of An Illumination? To Me, They Come After Hours Of Searching And Keeping My Soul Ready. Yet They Come In A Flash, As A Religious Phenomenon. The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter Had Such An Illumination, Beginning My Long Search For The Truth Of The Story And Flashing Light Into The Long Two Years Ahead.

Resentment Is The Most Precious Flower Of Poverty.

But All The Time-no Matter What She Was Doing-there Was Music.

When A Person Knows And Can't Make The Others Understand, What Does He Do?

But You Haven't Never Loved God Nor Even Nair Person. You Hard And Tough As Cowhide. But Just The Same I Knows You. This Afternoon You Going To Roam All Over The Place Without Never Being Satisfied. You Going To Traipse All Around Like You Haves To Find Something Lost. You Going To Work Yourself Up With Excitement. Your Heart Going To Beat Hard Enough To Kill You Because You Don't Love And Don't Have Peace. And Then Some Day You Going To Bust Loose And Be Ruined.

We Live In The Richest Country In The World. There's Plenty And To Spare For No Man, Woman, Or Child To Be In Want. And In Addition To This Our Country Was Founded On What Should Have Been A Great, True Principle - The Freedom, Equality, And Rights Of Each Individual. Huh! And What Has Come Of That Start? There Are Corporations Worth Billions Of Dollars - And Hundreds Of Thousands Of People Who Don't Get To Eat.

The Writer Must Hew The Phantom Rock.

People, Unless They Are Nilly-willy Or Very Sick, Cannot Be Taken Into The Hands And Be Changed Overnight Into Somthing More Worth-while And Profitable.

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