Raymond Carver Quotes

Raymond Clevie Carver Jr. was an American short-story writer and poet. Carver contributed to the revitalization of the American short story during the 1980s.

✵ 25. May 1938 – 2. August 1988  •  Other names ريموند كارفر, ریموند کارور

Raymond Carver photo

Unknown author, Unknown source / CC-BY-SA-3.0

Works

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

Raymond Carver

Cathedral

Cathedral

Raymond Carver

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

Raymond Carver

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

Raymond Carver

Cathedral

Cathedral

Raymond Carver

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

Raymond Carver

Raymond Carver: 51 quotes9 likes

Famous Raymond Carver Quotes

“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 book What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

Variant: and it ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we're talking about when we talk about love.
Source: What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

“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.”

Source: Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories

“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.”

Raymond Carver book What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

Source: What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981)

“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.”

Source: Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories

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

Source: Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories

Raymond Carver Quotes about love

“What do any of us really know about love?”

“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.”

Source: Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories

“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.”

Raymond Carver book What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981)

“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 book What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981)

Raymond Carver Quotes about time

“Booze takes a lot of time and effort if you're going to do a good job with it.”

Source: Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories

“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 book What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

Source: What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981)

“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.”

Source: All of Us: The Collected Poems

Raymond Carver: Trending quotes

“Woke up this morning with a terrific urge to lie in bed all day and read.”

“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.”

Raymond Carver book A New Path to the Waterfall

Source: A New Path to the Waterfall

Raymond Carver Quotes

“That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.”

“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.”

Source: Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories

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

Raymond Carver book Cathedral

Source: Cathedral

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

Source: Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories

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

Raymond Carver book Cathedral

Source: Cathedral

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

Source: Ultramarine: Poems

“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.”

Source: Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories

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

Raymond Carver book Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

Source: Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

“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.”

Source: Distance and other stories

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

Raymond Carver book Cathedral

Source: Cathedral

“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.”

Raymond Carver book What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

Source: What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981)

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

Source: Where Water Comes Together with Other Water: Poems

“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.”

Source: Where Water Comes Together with Other Water: Poems

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

Raymond Carver book What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

Source: What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981)

“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.”

Raymond Carver book Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

Source: Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

“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 book Elephant

Source: Elephant and Other Stories

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

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

Raymond Carver book Cathedral

Source: Cathedral

“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.”

Source: Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories

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

Source: Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories

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

Raymond Carver book What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

Source: What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

“She won't give him back his look.”

Raymond Carver book Cathedral

Source: Cathedral

“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 book What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981)

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