Quotes by Raymond Carver

They had laughed. They had leaned on each other and laughed until the tears had come, while everything else--the cold, and where hed go in it--was outside, for a while anyway.

I dont fire up the prose. I just tell it straight and dont fool around with it.

When you live in the dark for so long, you begin to love it. And it loves you back, and isn’t that the point? You think, the face turns to the shadows, and just as well. It accepts, it heals, it allows.But it also devours.

Im always learning something. Learning never ends.

They talked on into the early morning, the high, pale cast of light in the windows, and they did not think of leaving.

GriefWoke up early this morning and from my bedlooked far across the Strait to seea small boat moving through the choppy water,a single running light on. Rememberedmy friend who used to shouthis dead wife’s name from hilltopsaround Perugia. Who set a platefor her at his simple table long aftershe was gone. And opened the windowsso she could have fresh air. Such displayI found embarrassing. So did his otherfriends. I couldn’t see it.Not until this morning.

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 were talking about, it would just be a memory. Maybe not even a memory.

Nights without beginning that had no end. Talking about a past as if itd really happened. Telling themselves that this time next year, this time next year, things were going to be different.

Im moving to Nevada. Either there or kill myself.

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 Id like to know. I wish someone could tell me.

If were lucky, writer and reader alike, well finish the last line or two of a short story and then just sit for a minute, quietly. Ideally, well ponder what weve 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, well 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.

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

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

Write what you know, and what do you know better than your own secrets?

This is awful. I dont know whats going to happen to me or to anyone else in the world.

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

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

There was this funny thing of anything could happen now that we realized everything had.

Then I said something. I said, Suppose, just suppose, nothing had ever happened. Suppose this was for the first time. Just suppose. It doesnt hurt to suppose. Say none of the other had ever happened. You know what I mean? Then what? I said.

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.