Top 100 Raymond Carver Quotes
#1. My heart is broken," she goes. "It's turned to a piece of stone. I'm no good. That's what's as bad as anything, that I'm no good anymore.
Raymond Carver
#3. The smooth stones you pick up and examine under the moon's light have been made blue from the sea. Next morning when you pull them from your trouser pocket, they are still blue.
Raymond Carver
#4. The places where water comes together with other water. Those places stand out in my mind like holy places.
Raymond Carver
#5. I'm always learning something. Learning never ends.
Raymond Carver
#6. He wondered if she wondered if he were watching her.
Raymond Carver
#7. We opened our eyes and turned in bed to take a good look at each other. We both knew it then. We'd reached the end of something, and the thing was to find out where new to start.
Raymond Carver
#9. We knew our days were numbered. We had fouled up our lives and we were getting ready for a shake-up.
Raymond Carver
#10. It's possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things - a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring - with immense, even startling power.
Raymond Carver
#11. All this, all of this love we're talking about, it would just be a memory. Maybe not even a memory. Am I wrong? Am I way off base? Because I want you to set me straight if you think I'm wrong. I want to know. I mean, I don't know anything, and I'm the first one to admit it.
Raymond Carver
#12. It's strange. You never start out life with the intention of becoming a bankrupt or an alcoholic or a cheat and a thief. Or a liar.
Raymond Carver
#13. I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone's heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.
Raymond Carver
#14. Drinking's funny. When I look back on it, all of our important decisions have been figured out when we were drinking. Even when we talked about having to cut back on drinking, we'd be sitting at the kitchen table or out at the picnic table with a six-pack or whiskey.
Raymond Carver
#15. I've done as many as 20 or 30 drafts of a story. Never less than 10 or 12 drafts.
Raymond Carver
#16. But here is the thing. When he gets on me, I suddenly feel I am fat. I feel am terrifically fat, so fat that Rudy is a tiny thing and hardly there at all.
Raymond Carver
#17. Booze takes a lot of time and effort if you're going to do a good job with it.
Raymond Carver
#19. Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair. I like that.
Raymond Carver
#20. What's there to tell? The people over there embrace for a minute, and then they go inside the house together. They leave the light burning. Then they remember, and it goes out.
Raymond Carver
#21. When you live in the dark for so long, you begin to love it. And it loves you back, and isn't that the point? You think, the face turns to the shadows, and just as well. It accepts, it heals, it allows. But it also devours.
Raymond Carver
#22. Maybe once, maybe years ago, I was a different kind of human being. I've forgotten, I don't know for sure.
Raymond Carver
#23. Remember Haydn's 104 symphonies. Not all of them were great. But there were 104 of them.
Raymond Carver
#24. There is no answer. It's okay. But even if it wasn't okay, what am I supposed to do?
Raymond Carver
#25. It is August.
My life is going to change. I feel it.
Raymond Carver
#26. I thought for a minute of the world outside my house, and then I didn't have any more thoughts except the thought that I had to hurry up and sleep.
Raymond Carver
#27. You're a beautiful drunk, daughter. But you're a drunk.
Raymond Carver
#28. It's something that I feel I know about, relationships between men and women. I like to write from the woman's point of view now and again, to get inside her head, to feel what she's feeling.
Raymond Carver
#29. Happiness. It comes on unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really, any early morning talk about it.
Raymond Carver
#30. What good are insights? They only make things worse.
Raymond Carver
#31. Mel thought real love was nothing less than spiritual love. He'd said he'd spent five years in a seminary before quitting to go to medical school. He said he still looked back on those years in the seminary as the most important years of his life.
Raymond Carver
#32. He seemed full of some goodness she didn't understand
Raymond Carver
#33. That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.
Raymond Carver
#35. I'm a heart surgeon, sure, but I'm just a mechanic. I go in and I fuck around and I fix things. Shit.
Raymond Carver
#36. But I can hardly sit still. I keep fidgeting, crossing one leg and then the other. I feel like I could throw off sparks, or break a window
maybe rearrange all the furniture.
Raymond Carver
#37. Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications.
Raymond Carver
#38. The men who began their life's work on [the cathedrals], they never lived to see the completion of their work.
Raymond Carver
#39. Late Fragment
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
Raymond Carver
#41. A man without hands came to the door to sell me a photograph of my house. Except for the chrome hooks, he was an ordinary-looking man of fifty or so.
Raymond Carver
#42. Nights without beginning that had no end. Talking about a past as if it'd really happened. Telling themselves that this time next year, this time next year, things were going to be different.
Raymond Carver
#43. I dressed and went for a walk - determined not to return until I took in what Nature had to offer.
Raymond Carver
#45. Years later,
I still wanted to give up
friends, love, starry skies,
for a house where no one
was home, no one coming back,
and all I could drink
Raymond Carver
#46. Such beauty that for a minute
death and ambition, even love,
doesn't enter into this.
Raymond Carver
#47. Something's died in me," she goes. "It took a long time for it to do it, but it's dead. You've killed something, just like you'd took an axe to it. Everything is dirt now.
Raymond Carver
#48. I think a little menace is fine to have in a story. For one thing, it's good for the circulation.
Raymond Carver
#49. Fiction shows the external effects of internal conditions. Be aware of the tension between internal and external movement.
Raymond Carver
#50. When a reader finishes a wonderful story and lays it aside, he should have to pause for a minute and collect himself.
Raymond Carver
#52. I lifted him out. I held him. I held that half of him.
Raymond Carver
#53. I don't fire up the prose. I just tell it straight and don't fool around with it.
Raymond Carver
#54. You're ... writing for other writers to an extent-the dead writers whose work you admire, as well as the living writers you like to read.
Raymond Carver
#55. There is in the soul a desire for not thinking.
For being still. Coupled with this
a desire to be strict, yes, and rigorous.
But the soul is also a smooth son of a bitch,
not always trustworthy. And I forgot that.
Raymond Carver
#56. There are significant moments in everyone's day that can make literature. That's what you ought to write about.
Raymond Carver
#57. Then i don't know I remembered how he was when he was nineteen, the way he looked, running across this field to where his dad sat on a tractor, hand over his eyes, watching Wes run toward him - Chef's House
Raymond Carver
#58. In the beginning, when I was trying to write, I couldn't turn off the outside world to the extent that I can now.
Raymond Carver
#59. I think marriage is one of those things that writers draw on, one of those emotional reservoirs that go way back.
Raymond Carver
#60. Honey, no offense, but sometimes I think I could shoot you and watch you kick.
Raymond Carver
#61. That morning she pours Teacher's over my belly and licks it off. That afternoon she tries to jump out the window.
Raymond Carver
#62. He did not know what to do. Not just now, he thought, not just in this, not just about this, today and tomorrow, but every day on the earth.
Raymond Carver
#63. A great danger, or at least a great temptation, for many writers is to become too autobiographical in their approach to their fiction. A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.
Raymond Carver
#64. Do me a favor this morning. Draw the curtain and come back to bed.
Forget the coffee. We'll pretend
we're in a foreign country, and in love.
Raymond Carver
#65. There was this funny thing of anything could happen now that we realized everything had.
Raymond Carver
#66. It ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we're talking about when we talk about love.
Raymond Carver
#68. For a long time I wanted to do the kind of work my dad did. He was going to ask his foreman at the mill to put me on after I graduated. So I worked at the mill for about six months. But I hated the work and knew from the first day I didn't want to do that for the rest of my life.
Raymond Carver
#69. How far would you run with a piece of lead in your heart?
Raymond Carver
#70. Why don't you kids dance? he decided to say, and then said it. "Why don't you dance?
Raymond Carver
#71. When I'm fishing, I feel guilty that I'm not writing, and when I'm writing, I feel guilty that I'm not fishing. But when push comes to shove, I'll always take the writing.
Raymond Carver
#72. A man can go along obeying all the rules and then it don't matter a damn anymore.
Raymond Carver
#73. Most of my stories, if not all of them, have some basis in real life. That's the kind of fiction I'm most interested in. I suppose that's one reason I don't have much respect for fiction that seems to be game playing.
Raymond Carver
#74. My lungs are thick with the smoke of your absence.
Raymond Carver
#75. I'd like to go out in the front yard and shout something. "None of this is worth it!" That's what I'd like people to hear.
Raymond Carver
#77. Then I said something. I said, Suppose, just suppose, nothing had ever happened. Suppose this was for the first time. Just suppose. It doesn't hurt to suppose. Say none of the other had ever happened. You know what I mean? Then what? I said.
Raymond Carver
#80. The past is unclear. It's as if there is a film over those early years. I can't even be sure that the things I remember happening really happened to me.
Raymond Carver
#81. They talked on into the early morning, the high, pale cast of light in the windows, and they did not think of leaving.
Raymond Carver
#83. That's right,' Mel said. 'Some vassal would come along and spear the bastard in the name of love. Or whatever the fuck it was they fought over in those days.'
Same things we fight over these days,' Terri said.
Laura said, 'Nothing's changed.
Raymond Carver
#84. Anyone can express himself or herself, but what writers and poets want to do in their work, more than simply express themselves, is communicate.
Raymond Carver
#85. Ralph also took some classes in philosophy and literature and felt himself on the brink of some kind of huge discovery about himself. But it never came.
Raymond Carver
#86. There isn't enough of anything
as long as we live. But at intervals
a sweetness appears and, given a chance
prevails.
Raymond Carver
#87. After a minute, you continue writing.
she screams again.
you wonder how long this can go on.
Raymond Carver
#88. But dying is for the sweetest ones. And he remembers sweetness, when life was sweet, and sweetly he was given that other lifetime.
Raymond Carver
#89. In short, everything about his life was different for him at the bottom of that well.
Raymond Carver
#91. The light was draining out of the room, going back through the window where it had come from.
Raymond Carver
#92. There's literary creation and literary business. When I first got something accepted, it gave my life a validation it didn't otherwise have.
Raymond Carver
#93. I want to hide from it, that's what I want to do. I want to just close my eyes and let it pass by. Let it take the next man.
Raymond Carver
#94. Write what you know, and what do you know better than your own secrets?
Raymond Carver
#95. My circumstances of unrelieved responsibility and permanent distraction necessitated the short story form.
Raymond Carver
#96. When I'm writing, I write every day. It's lovely when that's happening. One day dovetailing into the next. Sometimes I don't even know what day of the week it is.
Raymond Carver
#97. I crack the other egg.
Surely we have diminished one another.
Raymond Carver
#98. The fiction I'm most interested in has lines of reference to the real world.
Raymond Carver
#99. Art doesn't have to do anything. It just has to be there for the fierce pleasure we take in doing it.
Raymond Carver
#100. This is awful. I don't know what's going to happen to me or to anyone else in the world.
Raymond Carver
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