Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

"I am not meant to be alone and without you who understands."

"That was all he wanted for himself – to give to her. Biff's mouth hardened. He had done nothing wrong but in him he felt a strange guilt. Why? The dark guilt in all men, unreckoned and without a name."

"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."

"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?"

"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."

"He did not wholly understand the intricate play of ideas and the complex phrases, but as he read he sensed a strong, who purpose behind the words and he felt that he almost understood."

"Next to music, beer was best."

"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."

"It was like that kid had been born knowing how to read. He was only in the second grade but he loved to read stories by himself - and he never asked anybody else to read to him."

"Today we are not put up on the platforms and sold at the courthouse square. But we are forced to sell our strength, our time, our souls during almost every hour that we live. We have been freed from one kind of slavery only to be delivered into another. Is this freedom?"

"The most fatal thing a man can do is try to stand alone."

"The eyes of his friend were moist and dark, and in them he saw the little rectangled pictures of himself that he had watched a thousand times."

"What did he understand? Nothing. Where was he headed? Nowhere. What did he want? To know. What? A meaning. Why? A riddle."

"Blount sat down to the table and leaned over close to Singer. "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. It's like in the fifteenth century when everybody believed the world was flat and only Columbus and a few other fellows knew the truth. But it's different in that it took talent to figure that the earth is round. While the truth is so obvious it's a miracle of all history that people don't know."

"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."

"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."

"That was the best of all. To speak the truth and be attended."

"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."