Once you have lived with another, it is a great torture to have to live alone.
Interpretation
Living together creates a strong bond, and the pain of separation can be deeply felt.
This quote by Carson McCullers highlights the profound emotional attachment that develops when two individuals share their lives intimately. The experience of loneliness following such companionship can serve as a significant source of distress, indicating how intertwined lives can lead to a deep sense of loss when apart.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of relationships during a wedding ceremony.
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. A fellow can’t live without giving his passive acceptance to meanness. 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.
There's nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book.
She was afraid of these things that made her suddenly wonder who she was, and what she was going to be in the world, and why she was standing at that minute, seeing a light, or listening, or staring up into the sky: alone.
The trouble with me is that for a long time I have just been an I person. All people belong to a We except me. Not to belong to a We makes you too lonesome.
Because in some men it is in them to give up everything personal at some time, before it ferments and poisons--throw it to some human being or some human idea. They have to.
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.
Getting married is very much like going to a restaurant with friends. You order what you want then when you see what the other person has, you wish you had ordered that.
Said of her husband on the day their divorce became final: Oh, don't worry about Alan. . . . Alan will always land on somebody's feet.
Habitat gives us an opportunity which is very difficult to find: to reach out and work side by side with those who never have had a decent home-but work with them on a completely equal basis. It's not a big-shot, little-shot relationship. It's a sense of equality.
What does one want when one is engaged in the sexual act? That everything around you give you its utter attention, think only of you, care only for you...every man wants to be a tyrant when he fornicates.
No adolescent ever wants to be understood, which is why they complain about being misunderstood all the time.
It's easier to be faithful to a restaurant than it is to a woman.
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