Raymond Carver Quotes

Woke up this morning with a terrific urge to lie in bed all day and read.

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.

And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.

I loved you so much once. I did. More than anything in the whole wide world. Imagine that. What a laugh that is now. Can you believe it? We were so intimate once upon a time I can't believe it now. The memory of being that intimate with somebody. We were so intimate I could puke. I can't imagine ever being that intimate with somebody else. I haven't been.

It ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we're talking about when we talk about love.

I've crossed some kind of invisible line. I feel as if I've come to a place I never thought I'd have to come to. And I don't know how I got here. It's a strange place. It's a place where a little harmless dreaming and then some sleepy, early-morning talk has led me into considerations of death and annihilation.

That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.

But I can hardly sit still. I keep fidgeting, crossing one leg and then the other. I feel like I could throw off sparks, or break a window—maybe rearrange all the furniture.

there isn't enough of anything as long as we live. But at intervals a sweetness appears and, given a chance prevails.

Dreams, you know, are what you wake up from.