Quote

I am a cigarette with a body attached to it

Raymond Carver

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Raymond Carver

Image
Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair. I like that.
Raymond Carver
Image
Dreams, you know, are what you wake up from.
Raymond Carver
Image
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
Image
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.
Raymond Carver
Image
What good are insights? They only make things worse.
Raymond Carver
Image
When a reader finishes a wonderful story and lays it aside, he should have to pause for a minute and collect himself.
Raymond Carver
Image
There is no God, and conversation is a dying art.
Raymond Carver
Image
That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.
Raymond Carver
Image
You've got to work with your mistakes until they look intended. Understand?
Raymond Carver
Image
Don’t complain, don’t explain.
Raymond Carver
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Raymond Carver
Image
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
Image
Fiction shows the external effects of internal conditions. Be aware of the tension between internal and external movement.
Raymond Carver
Image
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.
Raymond Carver
Image
You're a beautiful drunk, daughter. But you're a drunk.
Raymond Carver
Image
I'm always learning something. Learning never ends.
Raymond Carver
Image
Remember Haydn's 104 symphonies. Not all of them were great. But there were 104 of them.
Raymond Carver
Image
there isn't enough of anything as long as we live. But at intervals a sweetness appears and, given a chance prevails.
Raymond Carver