Raymond Carver: Going

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”