Carson McCullers

"To witness another's suffering is to become responsible for their healing."

"The past shapes us, but it need not define us."

"Hope is a seed that grows in the darkest soil."

"We are all both victim and perpetrator in the human drama."

"The act of writing is an act of resistance against erasure."

"To love imperfectly is the most honest path."

"Gratitude transforms how we see the world and ourselves in it."

"The search for truth often leads us away from comfort."

"In the embrace of another, we briefly escape our fundamental isolation."

"Imagination is the bridge between what is and what could be."

"The human heart is a lonely hunter, but it does hunt."

"We are all of us lonely."

"In the soul, there is a capacity for recognizing truth that transcends mere intellect."

"There is hope in dreams."

"Love is a joint experience between two persons."

"The writer by nature of his profession is a dreamer and a conscious dreamer."

"Passion is the genesis of genius."

"We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men, and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, we feel a responsibility for the actions of life."

"The most important thing is to make music, not to become a musician."

"If you have never wept bitter tears because a wonderful woman has passed into the world of phantoms, and because you love her with all your heart and soul, then you have missed one of the most poignant experiences of life."

"There is something curious about the contradictions in people."

"Art is the effort to make shells of the internal vision."

"The real experience of everyone is that they are alone."

"We want to be loved, and we want to think it's charity or something."

"The way the world is now, all senseless and brutal, we must try to be gentle."

"First of all, you must understand that we are in a weird time."

"Ugliness is an unnecessary evil in the world."

"There is an awful lot that has to be said about loneliness."

"The lesson of maturity is acceptance of what cannot be changed."

"If the world is cold, make it your business to build fires."