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Quotes About Reflection

Write what you know, and what do you know better than your own secrets?
~ Raymond Carver
What do any of us really know about love?
~ Raymond Carver
They talked on into the early morning, the high, pale cast of light in the windows, and they did not think of leaving.
~ Raymond Carver
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.
~ Raymond Carver
We knew our days were numbered. We had fouled up our lives and we were getting ready for a shake-up.
~ Raymond Carver
She won't give him back his look.
~ Raymond Carver
and did you get what you wanted from this life even so? i did.
~ Raymond Carver
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.
~ Raymond Carver
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.
~ Raymond Carver
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.
~ Raymond Carver
In short, everything about his life was different for him at the bottom of that well.
~ Raymond Carver
Maybe once, maybe years ago, I was a different kind of human being. I've forgotten, I don't know for sure.
~ Raymond Carver
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
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.
~ Raymond Carver
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.
~ Raymond Carver
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
He did not know what to do. Not just now, he thought, not just in this, not just about this, today and tomorrow, but every day on the earth.
~ Raymond Carver
Woke up this morning with a terrific urge to lie in bed all day and read. Fought against it for a minute. Then looked out the window at the rain. And gave over. Put myself entirely in the keep of this rainy morning.
~ Raymond Carver
Grief Woke up early this morning and from my bed looked far across the Strait to see a small boat moving through the choppy water, a single running light on. Remembered my friend who used to shout his dead wife's name from hilltops around Perugia. Who set a plate for her at his simple table long after she was gone. And opened the windows so she could have fresh air. Such display I found embarrassing. So did his other friends. I couldn't see it. Not until this morning.
~ Raymond Carver
I wish I could be like everybody else in this neighborhood--your basic, normal, unaccomplished person-and go up to my bedroom, and lie down, and sleep. It's going to be a big day today, and I'd like to be ready for it. I wish I could sleep and wake up and find everything in my life different. Not necessarily just the big things,.... but things clearly within my power.
~ Raymond Carver
Iba a contaros algo -empezó Mel-. Bueno, iba a demostrar algo. Veréis: sucedió hace unos meses, pero sigue sucediendo en este mismo instante, y es algo que debería hacer que nos avergoncemos cuando hablamos como si supiéramos de qué hablamos cuando hablamos de amor.
~ Raymond Carver
It made him feel older, having married friends.
~ Raymond Carver
You sound like a nice man," the woman said. "Do I? Well, that's nice of you to say." He knew he should hang up now, but it was good to hear a voice, even his own, in the quiet room.
~ Raymond Carver
I don't want to talk to anybody. Actually, I'd talk to Molly, if I could, but I can't any longer — she's somebody else now. She isn't Molly any more. But — what can I say? — I'm somebody else, too.
~ Raymond Carver