Raymond Carver Quotes

49 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Raymond Carver
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.

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

Raymond Carver
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.

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

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

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
Honey, no offense, but sometimes I think I could shoot you and watch you kick.

Raymond Carver
Something's died in me, she goes. It took a long time for it to do it, but it's dead. You've killed something, just like you'd took an axe to it. Everything is dirt now.

Raymond Carver
Maybe I just don't understand poetry. I admit it's not the first thing I reach for when I pick up something to read.

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
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.

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
And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.

Raymond Carver