Raymond Carver Quotes

49 Sourced Quotes

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

Raymond Carver
The smooth stones you pick up and examine under the moon's light have been made blue from the sea. Next morning when you pull them from your trouser pocket, they are still blue.

Raymond Carver
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.

Raymond Carver
Father, I love you,
yet how can I say thank you, I who can't hold my liquor either and don't even know the places to fish.

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

Raymond Carver
A great danger, or at least a great temptation, for many writers is to become too autobiographical in their approach to their fiction. A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.

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

Raymond Carver
You have to eat and keep going. Eating is a small, good thing in a time like this.

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

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

Raymond Carver
Woke up this morning with a terrific urge to lie in bed all day and read.

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
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.

Raymond Carver
Remember Haydn's 104 symphonies. Not all of them were great. But there were 104 of them.

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

Raymond Carver
When a reader finishes a wonderful story and lays it aside, he should have to pause for a minute and collect himself.

Raymond Carver
But I can hardly sit still. I keep fidgeting, crossing one leg and then the other. I feel like I could throw off sparks, or break a window — maybe rearrange all the furniture.

Raymond Carver
I've crossed some kind of invisible line. I feel as if I've come to a place I never thought I'd have to come to. And I don't know how I got here. It's a strange place. It's a place where a little harmless dreaming and then some sleepy, early-morning talk has led me into considerations of death and annihilation.

Raymond Carver
I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone's heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.

Raymond Carver
There isn't enough of anything as long as we live. But at intervals a sweetness appears and, given a chance prevails.

Raymond Carver
That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.

Raymond Carver
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.

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

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

Raymond Carver