Quote

Fiction shows the external effects of internal conditions. Be aware of the tension between internal and external movement.

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
Movement
Internal
Shows
External
Crafts
Tension
Aware
Effects
Conditions
Fiction
Internals

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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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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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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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Dreams, you know, are what you wake up from.
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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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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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Honey, no offense, but sometimes I think I could shoot you and watch you kick.
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There was this funny thing of anything could happen now that we realized everything had.
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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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I guess my writing has changed as my life has.
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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.
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In the beginning, when I was trying to write, I couldnt turn off the outside world to the extent that I can now.
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What good are insights? They only make things worse.
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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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That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.
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I am a cigarette with a body attached to it
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The fiction Im most interested in has lines of reference to the real world.
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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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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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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.
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