Top 100 Carver Quotes
#1. With the Cauldron, you could do other things than raise the dead. You could destroy the wall.
Sarah J. Maas
#2. 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. How useful Mr. Carver's Esperanto would be, she thought. (Only if everyone spoke it, of course.)
Kate Atkinson
#5. Young people, I want to beg of you always keep your eyes open to what Mother Nature has to teach you. By so doing you will learn many valuable things every day of your life.
George Washington Carver
#6. Nature is the greatest teacher and I learn from her best when others are asleep. In the still dark hours before sunrise God tells me of the plans I am to fulfill.
George Washington Carver
#7. 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
#8. The places where water comes together with other water. Those places stand out in my mind like holy places.
Raymond Carver
#10. I dub thee Toadsticker," I said. "Slayer of miscreants, opener of packages, occasional carver of baked turkeys. Let all men hear, and know mild caution." I swear the steel flickered.
Frank Tuttle
#11. I'm always learning something. Learning never ends.
Raymond Carver
#12. He wondered if she wondered if he were watching her.
Raymond Carver
#13. 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
#14. I'm moving to Nevada. Either there or kill myself.
Raymond Carver
#15. My short stories have always pushed twenty pages. That's no length for a short story to be. You either do them short like Carver or you stop trying.
Zadie Smith
#16. When I was young, I said to God, 'God, tell me the mystery of the universe.' But God answered, 'That knowledge is for me alone.' So I said, 'God, tell me the mystery of the peanut.' Then God said, 'Well George, that's more nearly your size.' And he told me.
George Washington Carver
#17. My latter schooldays and my university days were during the war, when science - physics, in particular - was a very important and glamorous subject. A lot of us felt that if we couldn't get into science, we might try engineering or medicine.
John Henry Carver
#18. Our creator is the same and never changes despite the names given Him by people here and in all parts of the world. Even if we gave Him no name at all, He would still be there, within us, waiting to give us good on this earth.
George Washington Carver
#19. We knew our days were numbered. We had fouled up our lives and we were getting ready for a shake-up.
Raymond Carver
#20. Believe. The promise of God are real. They are as real, as solid, yes infinitely more solid than this table which the materialist so thoroughly believes in. If you would only believe, O ye of little faith.
George Washington Carver
#21. Carver's best book yet! FROM A CHANGELING STAR combines deft characterization and fascinating extrapolation into a complex, compulsively readable thriller. I wish all science fiction novels could be this good.
Craig Shaw Gardner
#22. 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
#23. The college was run by a man called Mr. Carver whose lifelong passions were Esperanto and Pitman's shorthand, the latter more useful than the former.
Kate Atkinson
#24. All flowers talk to me and so do hundreds of little living things in the woods. I learn what I know by watching and loving everything.
George Washington Carver
#25. Most people search high and wide for the key to success. If they only knew, the key to their dreams lies within.
George Washington Carver
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. Raymond Carver is good. I think he'll be appreciated more and more. He's an easy writer to imitate.
Leslie Fiedler
#30. 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
#32. I think a lot of our team commitment is a silent understanding that each one of us has poured our life into what we're doing.
Claire Carver-Dias
#33. You knew I would find you and you knew what I'd do when I did." -Cort (The Carver's Problem)
B.L. Brooklyn
#34. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he was evil.
Edmund Carver
#35. I've done as many as 20 or 30 drafts of a story. Never less than 10 or 12 drafts.
Raymond Carver
#36. Fear of something is at the root of hate for others, and hate within will eventually destroy the hater. Keep your thoughts free from hate, and you need have no fear from those who hate you.
George Washington Carver
#37. All my life I have risen regularly at four o'clock and have gone into the woods and talked to God. There He gives me my orders for the day.
George Washington Carver
#38. 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
#39. Booze takes a lot of time and effort if you're going to do a good job with it.
Raymond Carver
#40. Whatever doesn't kill you makes a great story.
Mark Carver
#41. The need for justice grows out of the conflict of human interests. That is to say, if there were no conflict of interests among mankind we should never have invented the word justice, nor conceived the idea for which it stands.
Thomas Nixon Carver
#42. When you're writing fiction or poetry ... it really comes down to this: indifference to everything except what you're doing ... A young writer could do worse than follow the advice given in those lines.
Raymond Carver
#44. Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair. I like that.
Raymond Carver
#46. My dad read, I think, the Perry Mason mysteries and Zane Grey and some humor compendiums ... And then at one point, the bookmobile started coming to town. That was really cool. I mean, that was when I read my first Raymond Carver story. I think that was probably 1969 or so. I must have been 13.
Tom Drury
#47. Well understand this! If you want to join our sales team; I don't need pillion riders; I need high drivers who grasp the handle-bars.
Martin Carver
#48. 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
#50. So in fact, narrowing down our choices means less overwhelm, and more creativity.
Courtney Carver
#51. 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
#52. Besides, if I'd decided to pull Carver's spine out of his body, I would've done it already."
"Can you actually do that?"
Curran frowned. "I don't know. I mean theoretically if you broke the spine above the pelvis, you could, but then there are ribs ... I'll have to try it sometime.
Ilona Andrews
#53. Maybe once, maybe years ago, I was a different kind of human being. I've forgotten, I don't know for sure.
Raymond Carver
#55. Island Records used what we built and tried to cash in on it which is so annoying. So it came time to do Carver City record and Island wanted to do it and we're just like "What's the point?" I mean, at that point they were even admitting like, "Yeah, we're just gonna do what we've always done."
Jess Margera
#56. Remember Haydn's 104 symphonies. Not all of them were great. But there were 104 of them.
Raymond Carver
#57. There is no answer. It's okay. But even if it wasn't okay, what am I supposed to do?
Raymond Carver
#58. It is August.
My life is going to change. I feel it.
Raymond Carver
#59. *Always schedule enough time between connections. I always like to give myself at least two hours between flights. It's much easier to sit in the terminal for three hours than it is to sit on standby for two days because you missed your connection.
Morgan Carver Richards
#60. 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
#61. All of us, all of us, all of us trying to save our immortal souls, some ways seemingly more round about and mysterious than others. We are having a good time here. But hope all will be revealed soon.
Raymond Carver
#62. You're a beautiful drunk, daughter. But you're a drunk.
Raymond Carver
#63. 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
#64. Education, in the broadest of truest sense, will make an individual seek to help all people, regardless of race, regardless of color, regardless of condition.
George Washington Carver
#65. Since new developments are the products of a creative mind, we must therefore stimulate and encourage that type of mind in every way possible.
George Washington Carver
#66. Happiness. It comes on unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really, any early morning talk about it.
Raymond Carver
#68. What good are insights? They only make things worse.
Raymond Carver
#69. Set goals for things you can control. In my case, I can't control the marks from the judges, but I can control how I train every day, and I can control my performance.
Claire Carver-Dias
#70. 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
#71. Never a day passes but that I do myself the honor to commune with some of nature's varied forms.
George Washington Carver
#72. He seemed full of some goodness she didn't understand
Raymond Carver
#73. I was interested in nuclei originally with my deuteron photo work because that was one of the fundamental forces, and the measurement was basic to new science.
John Henry Carver
#74. People who never had enough thrift and forethought to buy and pay for property in the first place seldom have enough to keep property up after they have gained it in some other way.
Thomas Nixon Carver
#75. We have become ninety-nine percent money mad. The method of living at home modestly and within our income, laying a little by systematically for the proverbial rainy day which is due to come, can almost be listed among the lost arts.
George Washington Carver
#76. That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.
Raymond Carver
#78. Surprising how many people assumed that when a helicopter failed it simply rotored on down. Truth was, it fell with the aerodynamics of a grand piano.
Carver Greene
#80. Black people have been qualified to be president for hundreds of years. George Washington Carver could have been president. I could go on with a list of black men that were qualified to be the president of the United States. So the Obama victory is progress for white people.
Chris Rock
#81. Let us rejoice at the many unexplored fields in which there is unlimited fame and fortune to the successful explorer ...
George Washington Carver
#82. 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
#83. Beth is the kind of girl you want to stuff into a trunk, wrapped in plastic" - Shane Carver (Quote from: The Carver's Magic)
B.L. Brooklyn
#84. George Washington Carver explained, "Anything will give up its secrets if you love it enough." Mindfulness is this kind
Jack Kornfield
#86. 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
#87. Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications.
Raymond Carver
#88. The men who began their life's work on [the cathedrals], they never lived to see the completion of their work.
Raymond Carver
#89. . . . though if Fanshawe had not spoken in so unbecoming a way, Laurence would have liked to keep Carver out of it, as he knew the boy had a poor head for heights, which struck him as a grave impediment for an aviator.
Naomi Novik
#90. While there is no cure, cystic fibrosis is so close to being a livable disease. There is a lot of hope.
Max Carver
#91. Beauties" by Anton Chekhov, "The Doll's House" by Katherine Mansfield, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" by J. D. Salinger, "Brownies" or "Drinking Coffee Elsewhere" both by ZZ Packer, "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried" by Amy Hempel, "Fat" by Raymond Carver, "Indian Camp
Gabrielle Zevin
#92. No individual has any right to come into the world and go out of it without leaving behind him distinct and legitimate reasons for having passed through it.
George Washington Carver
#93. We're doing Circle of Snakes, we open up with Skin Carver and we are throwing in Skull Forest later on.
Glenn Danzig
#94. The beating on the tail of the snake may stop his progress a little, but the more vital parts must be struck before his poisonous death-dealing venom will be wiped out.
George Washington Carver
#95. Listen to the technology; find out what it's telling you.
Carver Mead
#96. 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
#97. The pattern of things was that each of the research students would be doing some particular experiment on the accelerator, often involving the building of counters or a system like that.
John Henry Carver
#99. To those who have not yet learned the secret of true happiness, begin now to study the little things in your own door yard.
George Washington Carver
#100. From a literary standpoint, I've been loving Raymond Carver's short stories, William Carlos Williams' poems, Richard Siken's 'Crush', John Fante, and Jim Harrison's book of ghazals. I love film and photography too, so many of my songs are very image rich from those influences.
Greta Salpeter
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
