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

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

“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

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

“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

“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

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

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

“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

“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

“Booze takes a lot of time and effort if you're going to do a good job with it.”
― Raymond Carver, Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories

“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

“I hate tricks. At the first sign of a trick or gimmick in a piece of fiction, a cheap trick or even an elaborate trick, I tend to look for cover. Tricks are ultimately boring, and I get bored easily, which may go along with my not having much of an attention span. But extremely clever chi-chi writing, or just plain tomfoolery writing, puts me to sleep. Writers don't need tricks or gimmicks or even necessarily need to be the smartest fellows on the block. At the risk of appearing foolish, a writer sometimes needs to be able to just stand and gape at this or that thing- a sunset or an old shoe- in absolute and simple amazement.”
― Raymond Carver, Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories

“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

“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

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

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

“I am too nervous to eat pie.”
― Raymond Carver

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

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

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

“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

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

“I'm moving to Nevada. Either there or kill myself.”
― Raymond Carver, Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories

“There was this funny thing of anything could happen now that we realized everything had.”
― Raymond Carver, Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories

“I'm a heart surgeon, sure, but I'm just a mechanic. I go in and I fuck around and I fix things. Shit.”
― Raymond Carver, Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories

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

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

“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

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

“My circumstances of unrelieved responsibility and permanent distraction necessitated the short story form.”
― Raymond Carver

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

“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

“We knew our days were numbered. We had fouled up our lives and we were getting ready for a shake-up.”
― Raymond Carver, Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories

“I love you, Bro”
― Raymond Carver

“She won't give him back his look.”
― Raymond Carver, Cathedral

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

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

“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

“In short, everything about his life was different for him at the bottom of that well.”
― Raymond Carver, Cathedral

“It's akin to style, what I'm talking about, but it isn't style alone. It is the writer's particular and unmistakable signature on everything he writes. It is his world and no other. This is one of the things that distinguishes one writer from another. Not talent. There's plenty of that around. But a writer who has some special way of looking at things and who gives artistic expression to that way of looking: that writer may be around for a time.”
― Raymond Carver, Collected Stories

“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, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

“Evan Connell said once that he knew he was finished with a short story when he found himself going through it and taking out commas and then going through the story again and putting the commas back in the same places. I like that way of working on something. I respect that kind of care for what is being done. That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones, with the punctuation in the right places so that they an best say what they are meant to say. If the words are heavy with the writer's own unbridled emotions, or if they are imprecise and inaccurate for some other reason -- if the worlds are in any way blurred -- the reader's eyes will slide right over them and nothing will be achieved. Henry James called this sort of hapless writing 'weak specification'.”
― Raymond Carver, Call If You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Other Prose

“That was in Crescent City, California, up near the Oregon border. I left soon after. But today I was thinking of that place, of Crescent City, and of how I was trying out a new life there with my wife, and how, in the barber's chair that morning, I had made up my mind to go. I was thinking today about the calm I felt when I closed my eyes and let the barber's fingers move through my hair, the sweetness of those fingers, the hair already starting to grow.”
― Raymond Carver, Where I'm Calling from: New and Selected Stories

“Booze takes a lot of time and effort if you’re going to do a good job with it.”
― Raymond Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

“The places where water comes together with other water. Those places stand out in my mind like holy places.”
― Raymond Carver, Where Water Comes Together with Other Water: Poems

“and did you get what you wanted from this life even so? i did.”
― Raymond Carver

“But I guess even the knights were vessels to someone. Isn't that the way it worked? But then everyone is always a vessel to someone. Isn't that right, Terri? But what I liked about the knights, besides their ladies, was that they had that suit of armor, you know, and they couldn't get hurt very easily. No cars in those days, you know? No drunk teenagers to tear into your ass."

Vassals," Terri said.

What?" Mel said.

Vassals," Terri said. "They were called vassals.”
― Raymond Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

“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, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?