Quotes from Raymond Carver

Then I said something. I said, Suppose, just suppose, nothing had ever happened. Suppose this was for the first time. Just suppose. It doesn't hurt to suppose. Say none of the other had ever happened. You know what I mean? Then what? I said.

I am too nervous to eat pie.

I'm always learning something. Learning never ends.

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

The light was draining out of the room, going back through the window where it had come from.

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.

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.

What good are insights? They only make things worse.

What do any of us really know about love?

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.

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.

Suppose I say summer, write the word hummingbird, put it in an envelope, take it down the hill to the box. When you open my letter you will recall those days and how much, just how much, I love you.

You're a beautiful drunk, daughter. But you're a drunk.

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.

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

It's akin to style, what I'm talking about, but it isn't style alone. It is the writer's particular and unmistakable signature on everything he writes. It is his world and no other. This is one of the things that distinguishes one writer from another. Not talent. There's plenty of that around. But a writer who has some special way of looking at things and who gives artistic expression to that way of looking: that writer may be around for a time.

That morning she pours Teacher's over my belly and licks it off. That afternoon she tries to jump out the window.

All of us, all of us, all of us trying to save our immortal souls, some ways seemingly more round about and mysterious than others. We are having a good time here. But hope all will be revealed soon.

We opened our eyes and turned in bed to take a good look at each other. We both knew it then. We'd reached the end of something, and the thing was to find out where new to start.

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

You have to have been in love to write poetry.

We knew our days were numbered. We had fouled up our lives and we were getting ready for a shake-up.

A man without hands came to the door to sell me a photograph of my house. Except for the chrome hooks, he was an ordinary-looking man of fifty or so.

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