Raymond Carver Quotes

“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.”

“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.”

“There was a time when I thought I loved my first wife more than life itself. But now I hate her guts. I do. How do you explain that? What happened to that love? What happened to it, is what I'd like to know. I wish someone could tell me.”

“I loved you so much once. I did. More than anything in the whole wide world. Imagine that. What a laugh that is now. Can you believe it? We were so intimate once upon a time I can't believe it now. The memory of being that intimate with somebody. We were so intimate I could puke. I can't imagine ever being that intimate with somebody else. I haven't been.”

“There was this funny thing of anything could happen now that we realized everything had.”

“You see, this happened a few months ago, but it's still going on right now, and it ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we're talking about when we talk about love.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Dreams, you know, are what you wake up from.”

“Honey, no offense, but sometimes I think I could shoot you and watch you kick.”

“You've got to work with your mistakes until they look intended. Understand?”

“there isn't enough of anything
as long as we live. But at intervals
a sweetness appears and, given a chance
prevails.”

“Get in, get out. Don't linger. Go on.”

“Don’t complain, don’t explain.”

“This is awful. I don't know what's going to happen to me or to anyone else in the world.”

“He wondered if she wondered if he were watching her.”

“I am a cigarette with a body attached to it”

“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.”

“But he stays by the window, remembering that life. They had laughed. They had leaned on each other and laughed until the tears had come, while everything else—the cold and where he'd go in it—was outside, for a while anyway.”

“There is no answer. It's okay. But even if it wasn't okay, what am I supposed to do?”

“Happiness. It comes on
unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really,
any early morning talk about it.”

“Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications.”

“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.”

“My lungs are thick with the smoke of your absence.”

“I am too nervous to eat pie.”

“The places where water comes together with other water. Those places stand out in my mind like holy places.”

“A man can go along obeying all the rules and then it don’t matter a damn anymore.”

“What good are insights? They only make things worse.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Write what you know, and what do you know better than your own secrets?”

“I'm always learning something. Learning never ends.”

“You're a beautiful drunk, daughter.
But you're a drunk.”

“That morning she pours Teacher's over my belly and licks it off. That afternoon she tries to jump out the window.”

“We knew our days were numbered. We had fouled up our lives and we were getting ready for a shake-up.”

“I'm moving to Nevada. Either there or kill myself.”

“The light was draining out of the room, going back through the window where it had come from.”

“She won't give him back his look.”

“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.”