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

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
Finally
Ones
Words
Better
Right
Writing

More quotes by Raymond Carver

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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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It's strange. You never start out life with the intention of becoming a bankrupt or an alcoholic or a cheat and a thief. Or a liar.
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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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Happiness. It comes on unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really, any early morning talk about it.
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I am a cigarette with a body attached to it
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There was a time when I thought I loved my first wife more than life itself. But now I hate her guts. I do. How do you explain that? What happened to that love? What happened to it, is what I'd like to know. I wish someone could tell me.
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I am too nervous to eat pie.
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She won't give him back his look.
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Remember Haydn's 104 symphonies. Not all of them were great. But there were 104 of them.
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There was this funny thing of anything could happen now that we realized everything had.
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Life and death matters, yes. And the question of how to behave in this world, how to go in the face of everything. Time is short and the water is rising.
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You're a beautiful drunk, daughter. But you're a drunk.
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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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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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Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair. I like that.
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I guess my writing has changed as my life has.
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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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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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When a reader finishes a wonderful story and lays it aside, he should have to pause for a minute and collect himself.
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