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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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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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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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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The fiction Im most interested in has lines of reference to the real world.
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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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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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Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair. I like that.
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That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.
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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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You're a beautiful drunk, daughter. But you're a drunk.
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There was this funny thing of anything could happen now that we realized everything had.
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