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You have to have been in love to write poetry.

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
Write
Writing
Love
Poetry

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I am a cigarette with a body attached to it
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Fiction shows the external effects of internal conditions. Be aware of the tension between internal and external movement.
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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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What good are insights? They only make things worse.
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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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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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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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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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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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That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.
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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.
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Get in, get out. Don't linger. Go on.
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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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Honey, no offense, but sometimes I think I could shoot you and watch you kick.
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You're a beautiful drunk, daughter. But you're a drunk.
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I guess my writing has changed as my life has.
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There's literary creation and literary business. When I first got something accepted, it gave my life a validation it didn't otherwise have.
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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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Happiness. It comes on unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really, any early morning talk about it.
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