Literary Birthday – 19 February – Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers was born on 19 February 1917 and died on 29 September 1967.

Carson McCullers Quotes

1. I live with the people I create and it has always made my essential loneliness less keen.
2. There’s nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book.
3. We are homesick most for the places we have never known.
4. Wherever you look there’s meanness and corruption. This room, this bottle of grape wine, these fruits in the basket, are all products of profit and loss. Somebody wears his tail to a frazzle for every mouthful we eat and every stitch we wear—and nobody seems to know. Everybody is blind, dumb, and blunt-headed—stupid and mean.
5. The closest thing to being cared for is to care for someone else.
6. The mind is like a richly woven tapestry in which the colours are distilled from the experiences of the senses, and the design drawn from the convolutions of the intellect.
7. The thinking mind is best controlled by the imagination.
8. 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 love and the struggle that goes with love?
9. I must go home periodically to renew my sense of horror.

Carson McCullers was an American writer of novels, short stories, plays, essays, and poetry. She is most famous for The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. The Member of the Wedding was adapted into a successful Broadway play and film. McCullers’s writing featured relationships, loneliness, and the longing for human connection. She also focussed on the eccentricities of people facing physical and psychological challenges. She suffered from as number of strokes that incapacitated her for long periods. Partial paralysis confined her to a wheelchair in her later years. Along with Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, and Katherine Anne Porter, she was one of the leading female writers of southern Gothic fiction in the 20th century.

Source for image: Carl Van Vechten, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Carsonmccullers.jpg

by Amanda Patterson

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