Quote

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

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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 too nervous to eat pie.
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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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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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She won't give him back his look.
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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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Get in, get out. Don't linger. Go on.
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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...writing for other writers to an extent-the dead writers whose work you admire, as well as the living writers you like to read.
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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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My life is going to change. I feel it.
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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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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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I'm always learning something. Learning never ends.
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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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A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.
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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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What good are insights? They only make things worse.
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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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