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

More quotes by Raymond Carver

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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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Don’t complain, don’t explain.
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I am too nervous to eat pie.
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There is no answer. It's okay. But even if it wasn't okay, what am I supposed to do?
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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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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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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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The fiction Im most interested in has lines of reference to the real world.
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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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She won't give him back his look.
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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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My life is going to change. I feel it.
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You've got to work with your mistakes until they look intended. Understand?
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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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I dressed and went for a walk - determined not to return until I took in what Nature had to offer.
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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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Dreams, you know, are what you wake up from.
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Anyone can express himself or herself, but what writers and poets want to do in their work, more than simply express themselves, is communicate.
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There was this funny thing of anything could happen now that we realized everything had.
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