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

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I guess my writing has changed as my life has.
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We knew our days were numbered. We had fouled up our lives and we were getting ready for a shake-up.
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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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Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications.
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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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You've got to work with your mistakes until they look intended. Understand?
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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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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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I dressed and went for a walk - determined not to return until I took in what Nature had to offer.
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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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Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair. I like that.
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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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She won't give him back his look.
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The fiction Im most interested in has lines of reference to the real world.
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