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Raymond Carver Quotes | Quotes said by Raymond Carver

  • Raymond Carver Quote #1

    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 Quote #2

    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 Quote #3

    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.

  • Raymond Carver Quote #4

    And the terrible thing, the terrible thing is, but the good thing too, the saving grace, is that if something happened to one of us--excuse me for saying this--but if something happened to one of us tomorrow, I think the other one, the other person, would grieve for a while, you know, but then the surviving party would go out and love again, have someone else soon enough. All this, all of this love we're talking about, it would just be a memory. Maybe not even a memory.

  • Raymond Carver Quote #5

    But dying is for the sweetest ones. And he remembers sweetness, when life was sweet, and sweetly he was given that other lifetime.

  • Raymond Carver Quote #6

    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 Quote #7

    Don’t complain, don’t explain.

  • Raymond Carver Quote #8

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

  • Raymond Carver Quote #9

    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 Quote #10

    For a long time I wanted to do the kind of work my dad did. He was going to ask his foreman at the mill to put me on after I graduated. So I worked at the mill for about six months. But I hated the work and knew from the first day I didn't want to do that for the rest of my life.

  • Raymond Carver Quote #11

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

  • Raymond Carver Quote #12

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

  • Raymond Carver Quote #13

    I crack the other egg.
    Surely we have diminished one another.

  • Raymond Carver Quote #14

    I lifted him out. I held him. I held that half of him.

  • Raymond Carver Quote #15

    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 Quote #16

    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 Quote #17

    I'm moving to Nevada. Either there or kill myself.

  • Raymond Carver Quote #18

    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 Quote #19

    If we're lucky, writer and reader alike, we'll finish the last line or two of a short story and then just sit for a minute, quietly. Ideally, we'll ponder what we've just written or read; maybe our hearts or intellects will have been moved off the peg just a little from where they were before. Our body temperature will have gone up, or down, by a degree. Then, breathing evenly and steadily once more, we'll collect ourselves, writers and readers alike, get up, created of warm blood and nerves as a Chekhov character puts it, and go on to the next thing: Life. Always life.

  • Raymond Carver Quote #20

    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 Quote #21

    It's possible, in a poem or a 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. It is possible to write a line of seemingly innocuous dialogue and have it send a chill along the reader's spine-- the source of artistic delight, as Nabokov would have it. That's the kind of writing that most interests me.

  • Raymond Carver Quote #22

    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.

  • Raymond Carver Quote #23

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

  • Raymond Carver Quote #24

    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.

  • Raymond Carver Quote #25

    Sai bene che non sogno.
    Ma ieri notte ho sognato che assistevamo
    a un funerale nel mare. All’inizio ero attonito.
    Poi pieno di rimpianti. Ma tu
    m’hai sfiorato un braccio e hai detto: “no, va tutto bene.
    Era molto vecchia, e poi lui l’ha amata tutta la vita

  • Raymond Carver Quote #26

    She serves me a piece of it a few minutes
    out of the oven. A little steam rises
    from the slits on top. Sugar and spice -
    cinnamon - burned into the crust.
    But she's wearing these dark glasses
    in the kitchen at ten o'clock
    in the morning - everything nice -
    as she watches me break off
    a piece, bring it to my mouth,
    and blow on it. My daughter's kitchen,
    in winter. I fork the pie in
    and tell myself to stay out of it.
    She says she loves him. No way
    could it be worse.

  • Raymond Carver Quote #27

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

  • Raymond Carver Quote #28

    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.

  • Raymond Carver Quote #29

    The places where water comes together with other water. Those places stand out in my mind like holy places.

  • Raymond Carver Quote #30

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

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