Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? Quotes

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

“It is August.
My life is going to change. I feel it.”
― Raymond Carver, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

“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?

“I lifted him out. I held him. I held that half of him.”
― Raymond Carver, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

“He was reaching to light a cigarette with his last match when his hands began to tremble. The match went out, and he stood there holding the empty matchbook and the cigarette, staring at the vast expanse of trees at the end of the bright meadow.
“Harry, we have to love each other,” she said. “We’ll just have to love each other,” she said.”
― Raymond Carver, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

“You’ll be surprised to see what can collect in a mattress over the months, over the years. Every day, every night of our lives, we’re leaving little bits of ourselves, flakes of this and that, behind. Where do they go, these bits and pieces of ourselves? Right through the sheets and into the mattress, that’s where! Pillows, too. It’s all the same. He”
― Raymond Carver, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

“Though he continued to take classes here and there in the sciences and in business, 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?

“You sound like a nice man,” the woman said. “Do I? Well, that’s nice of you to say.” He knew he should hang up now, but it was good to hear a voice, even his own, in the quiet room.”
― Raymond Carver, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

“He did not know what to do. Not just now, he thought, not just in this, not just about this, today and tomorrow, but every day on earth.”
― Raymond Carver, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

“He stared. What, after all, should he do? Take his things and leave? Go to a hotel? Make certain arrangements? How should a man act, given these circumstances”
― Raymond Carver, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

“Were there other men, he wondered drunkenly, who could look at one event in their lives and perceive in it the tiny makings of the catastrophe that thereafter set their lives on a different course?”
― Raymond Carver, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

“It’s not that,” he said, not knowing what he meant.”
― Raymond Carver, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

“You wouldn't do anything like that,' he said.
'You'll see,' I said.”
― Raymond Carver, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

“Mike, you're not asleep, are you?"
"No," he said. "Nothing like that."
"Well don't go to sleep before me," she said. "I don't want to be awake by myself.”
― Raymond Carver, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

“You’ll be surprised to see what can collect in a mattress over the months, over the years. Every day, every night of our lives, we’re leaving little bits of ourselves, flakes of this and that, behind. Where do they go, these bits and pieces of ourselves?”
― Raymond Carver, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?