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Get in, get out. Don't linger. Go on.

Raymond Carver

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Raymond Carver
Age: 50 †
Born: 1938
Born: May 25
Died: 1988
Died: August 2
Author
Novelist
Poet
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Writer
Clatskanie
Oregon
Linger

More quotes by Raymond Carver

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My heart is broken,” she goes. “It’s turned to a piece of stone. I’m no good. That’s what’s as bad as anything, that I’m no good anymore.
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We knew our days were numbered. We had fouled up our lives and we were getting ready for a shake-up.
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Happiness. It comes on unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really, any early morning talk about it.
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You've got to work with your mistakes until they look intended. Understand?
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Then I said something. I said, Suppose, just suppose, nothing had ever happened. Suppose this was for the first time. Just suppose. It doesn't hurt to suppose. Say none of the other had ever happened. You know what I mean? Then what? I said.
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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.
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That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.
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Dreams, you know, are what you wake up from.
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Anyone can express himself or herself, but what writers and poets want to do in their work, more than simply express themselves, is communicate.
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My life is going to change. I feel it.
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This is awful. I don't know what's going to happen to me or to anyone else in the world.
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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. Would I live my life over again? Make the same unforgivable mistakes? Yes, given half a chance. Yes.
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there isn't enough of anything as long as we live. But at intervals a sweetness appears and, given a chance prevails.
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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.
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Don’t complain, don’t explain.
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There is no God, and conversation is a dying art.
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Honey, no offense, but sometimes I think I could shoot you and watch you kick.
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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.
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I think a little menace is fine to have in a story. For one thing, it's good for the circulation.
Raymond Carver
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The fiction Im most interested in has lines of reference to the real world.
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