Raymond Carver > Quotes

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

“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

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

“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, A New Path to the Waterfall

“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.”
― Raymond Carver, Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories

“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.”
― Raymond Carver, Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories

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

“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

“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, 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, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

“You've got to work with your mistakes until they look intended. Understand?”
― Raymond Carver, Cathedral

“Honey, no offense, but sometimes I think I could shoot you and watch you kick.”
― Raymond Carver, Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories

“Dreams, you know, are what you wake up from.”
― Raymond Carver, The Bridle

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

“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, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

“Don’t complain, don’t explain.”
― Raymond Carver

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

“Woke up this morning with
a terrific urge to lie in bed all day
and read. Fought against it for a minute.

Then looked out the window at the rain.
And gave over. Put myself entirely
in the keep of this rainy morning.

Would I live my life over again?
Make the same unforgivable mistakes?
Yes, given half a chance. Yes.

- Rain”
― Raymond Carver, All of Us: The Collected Poems

“This is awful. I don't know what's going to happen to me or to anyone else in the world.”
― Raymond Carver, Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories

“and 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, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

“He wondered if she wondered if he were watching her.”
― Raymond Carver, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

“I am a cigarette with a body attached to it”
― Raymond Carver

“Happiness

So early it's still almost dark out.
I'm near the window with coffee,
and the usual early morning stuff
that passes for thought.

When I see the boy and his friend
walking up the road
to deliver the newspaper.

They wear caps and sweaters,
and one boy has a bag over his shoulder.
They are so happy
they aren't saying anything, these boys.

I think if they could, they would take
each other's arm.
It's early in the morning,
and they are doing this thing together.

They come on, slowly.
The sky is taking on light,
though the moon still hangs pale over the water.

Such beauty that for a minute
death and ambition, even love,
doesn't enter into this.

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

“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

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

“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, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

“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.”
― Raymond Carver, Distance and other stories

“And certain things around us will change, become easier or harder, one thing or the other, but nothing will ever really be any different. I believe that. We have made our decisions, our lives have been set in motion, and they will go on and on until they stop. But if that is true, then what? I mean, what if you believe that, but you keep it covered up, until one day something happens that should change something, but then you see nothing is going to change after all. What then? Meanwhile, the people around you continue to talk and act as if you were the same person as yesterday, or last night, or five minutes before, but you are really undergoing a crisis, your heart feels damaged…”
― Raymond Carver, Short Cuts: Selected Stories

“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, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

“There is in the soul a desire for not thinking.
For being still. Coupled with this
a desire to be strict, yes, and rigorous.
But the soul is also a smooth son of a bitch,
not always trustworthy. And I forgot that.”
― Raymond Carver, All of Us: The Collected Poems