Quotes by Raymond Carver

“I'm a heart surgeon, sure, but I'm just a mechanic. I go in and I fuck around and I fix things. Shit.”

“I loved you so much once. I did. More than anything in the whole wide world. Imagine that. What a laugh that is now. Can you believe it? We were so intimate once upon a time I can't believe it now....”

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

“Happiness. It comes onunexpectedly. And goes beyond, really,any early morning talk about it.”

“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 h...”

“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.”

“there isn't enough of anythingas long as we live. But at intervalsa sweetness appears and, given a chanceprevails.”

“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.”

“That's right,' Mel said. 'Some vassal would come along and spear the bastard in the name of love. Or whatever the fuck it was they fought over in those days.'Same things we fight over these days,' ...”

“Dreams, you know, are what you wake up from.”

“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.”

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

“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 sto...”

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

“Evan Connell said once that he knew he was finished with a short story when he found himself going through it and taking out commas and then going through the story again and putting the commas bac...”

“V.S. Pritchett's definition of a short story is 'something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing.' Notice the 'glimpse' part of this. First the glimpse. Then the glimpse gives life, turne...”

“I don't fire up the prose. I just tell it straight and don't fool around with it.”

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

“When you live in the dark for so long, you begin to love it. And it loves you back, and isnt that the point? You think, the face turns to the shadows, and just as well. It accepts, it heals, it all...”

“She serves me a piece of it a few minutesout of the oven. A little steam risesfrom the slits on top. Sugar and spice -cinnamon - burned into the crust.But she's wearing these dark glassesin the kit...”