Raymond Carver Quotes

They talked on into the early morning, the high, pale cast of light in the windows, and they did not think of leaving.

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

My circumstances of unrelieved responsibility and permanent distraction necessitated the short story form.

I'm a heart surgeon, sure, but I'm just a mechanic. I go in and I fuck around and I fix things. Shit.

It ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we're talking about when we talk about love.

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.

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

I've crossed some kind of invisible line. I feel as if I've come to a place I never thought I'd have to come to. And I don't know how I got here. It's a strange place. It's a place where a little harmless dreaming and then some sleepy, early-morning talk has led me into considerations of death and annihilation.

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.

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

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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

Don’t complain, don’t explain.

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

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.

I'm always learning something. Learning never ends.