Raymond Carver quotes

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)
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. View quote
Raymond Carver
Booze takes a lot of time and effort if you're going to do a good job with it. View quote
Raymond Carver
You're a beautiful drunk, daughter. But you're a drunk. View quote
Raymond Carver
I'm moving to Nevada. Either there or kill myself. View quote
Raymond Carver
She won't give him back his look. View quote
Raymond Carver
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. View quote
Raymond Carver
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Raymond Carver
That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones. (Raymond Carver)
You've got to work with your mistakes until they look intended. Understand? View quote
Raymond Carver
Get in, get out. Don't linger. Go on. View quote
Raymond Carver
Life and death matters, yes. And the question of how to behave in this world, how to go in the face of everything. Time is short and the water is rising. View quote
Raymond Carver
I guess my writing has changed as my life has. View quote
Raymond Carver
A great danger, or at least a great temptation, for many writers is to become too autobiographical in their approach to their fiction. A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best. View quote
Raymond Carver
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. View quote
Raymond Carver
There was this funny thing of anything could happen now that we realized everything had. View quote
Raymond Carver
I am too nervous to eat pie. View quote
Raymond Carver
The places where water comes together with other water. Those places stand out in my mind like holy places. View quote
Raymond Carver
A man can go along obeying all the rules and then it don't matter a damn anymore. (Raymond Carver)
What good are insights? They only make things worse. View quote
Raymond Carver
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. View quote
Raymond Carver
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. View quote
Raymond Carver
Write what you know, and what do you know better than your own secrets? View quote
Raymond Carver