Quotes from Raymond Carver

This is awful. I don't know what's going to happen to me or to anyone else in the world.

He wondered if she wondered if he were watching her.

and it ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we're talking about when we talk about love.

I am a cigarette with a body attached to it

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.

There is no answer. It's okay. But even if it wasn't okay, what am I supposed to do?

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.

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.

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.

Most of my stories, if not all of them, have some basis in real life. That's the kind of fiction I'm most interested in. I suppose that's one reason I don't have much respect for fiction that seems to be game playing.

Booze takes a lot of time and effort if you're going to do a good job with it.

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.

Drinking's funny. When I look back on it, all of our important decisions have been figured out when we were drinking. Even when we talked about having to cut back on drinking, we'd be sitting at the kitchen table or out at the picnic table with a six-pack or whiskey.

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

Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications.

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.

My lungs are thick with the smoke of your absence.

It is August. My life is going to change. I feel it.

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

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

A man can go along obeying all the rules and then it don't matter a damn anymore.

I'm a heart surgeon, sure, but I'm just a mechanic. I go in and I fuck around and I fix things. Shit.

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.

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.