Quotes from Raymond Carver

How far would you run with a piece of lead in your heart?

She won't give him back his look.

and did you get what you wanted from this life even so? i did.

The past is unclear. It's as if there is a film over those early years. I can't even be sure that the things I remember happening really happened to me.

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

I want to hide from it, that's what I want to do. I want to just close my eyes and let it pass by. Let it take the next man.

I don't know why, but I suddenly felt a long way away from everybody I had known and loved when I was a girl. I missed people. For a minute I stood there and wished I could get back to that time. Then with my next thought I understood clearly that I couldn't do that. No. But it came to me then that my life did not remotely resemble the life I thought I'd have when I had been young and looking ahead to things.

But I guess even the knights were vessels to someone. Isn't that the way it worked? But then everyone is always a vessel to someone. Isn't that right, Terri? But what I liked about the knights, besides their ladies, was that they had that suit of armor, you know, and they couldn't get hurt very easily. No cars in those days, you know? No drunk teenagers to tear into your ass. Vassals, Terri said. What? Mel said. Vassals, Terri said. They were called vassals.

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.

In short, everything about his life was different for him at the bottom of that well.

There is no God, and conversation is a dying art.

But I guess even the knights were vessels to someone. Isn't that the way it worked? But then everyone is always a vessel to someone.

A man without hands came to the door to sell me a photograph of my house.

I love you, Bro

Your face, your mouth, your shoulder inconceivable to me now! Where did they go? It's like I dreamed them. The stones we brought home from the beach lie face up on the windowsill, cooling. Come home. Do you hear? My lungs are thick with the smoke of your absence.

Why don't you kids dance? he decided to say, and then said it. Why don't you dance?

Maybe once, maybe years ago, I was a different kind of human being. I've forgotten, I don't know for sure.

I think a little menace is fine to have in a story. For one thing, it's good for the circulation.

In addition to being in love, we like each other and enjoy one another's company.

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

That was in Crescent City, California, up near the Oregon border. I left soon after. But today I was thinking of that place, of Crescent City, and of how I was trying out a new life there with my wife, and how, in the barber's chair that morning, I had made up my mind to go. I was thinking today about the calm I felt when I closed my eyes and let the barber's fingers move through my hair, the sweetness of those fingers, the hair already starting to grow.

Things change, he says. I don't know how they do. But they do without your realizing it or wanting them to.

It was [John Gardner's] conviction that if the words in the story were blurred because of the author's insensitivity, carelessness, or sentimentality, then the story suffered from a tremendous handicap. But there was something even worse and something that must be avoided at all costs: if the words and the sentiments were dishonest, the author was faking it, writing about things he didn't care about or believe in, then nobody could ever care anything about it.

But he understood it was over, and he felt able to let her go. He was sure their life together had happened in the way he said it had. But it was something that had passed. And that passing--though it seemed impossible and he'd fought against it--would become part of him now, too, as surely as anything else he'd left behind.