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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.

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
World
Face
Faces
Water
Death
Rising
Everything
Behave
Matter
Matters
Time
Short
Life
Question

More quotes by Raymond Carver

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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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I think a little menace is fine to have in a story. For one thing, it's good for the circulation.
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There was this funny thing of anything could happen now that we realized everything had.
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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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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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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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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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Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair. I like that.
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The fiction Im most interested in has lines of reference to the real world.
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You've got to work with your mistakes until they look intended. Understand?
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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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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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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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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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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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Remember Haydn's 104 symphonies. Not all of them were great. But there were 104 of them.
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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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That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.
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