01c. 1958 ADAnd the terrible thing, the terrible thing is, but the good thing too, the saving grace, is that if something happened to one of us--excuse me for saying this--but if something happened to one of us tomorrow, I think the other one, the other person, would grieve for a while, you know, but then the surviving party would go out and love again, have someone else soon enough. All this, all of this love we're talking about, it would just be a memory. Maybe not even a memory.Raymond Carver / quote ↗
02c. 1958 ADNights without beginning that had no end. Talking about a past as if it'd really happened. Telling themselves that this time next year, this time next year, things were going to be different.Raymond Carver / quote ↗
04c. 1958 ADThere 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.Raymond Carver / quote ↗
05c. 1958 ADIf we're lucky, writer and reader alike, we'll finish the last line or two of a short story and then just sit for a minute, quietly. Ideally, we'll ponder what we've just written or read; maybe our hearts or intellects will have been moved off the peg just a little from where they were before. Our body temperature will have gone up, or down, by a degree. Then, breathing evenly and steadily once more, we'll collect ourselves, writers and readers alike, get up, "created of warm blood and nerves" as a Chekhov character puts it, and go on to the next thing: Life. Always life.Raymond Carver / quote ↗
06c. 1958 ADHoney, no offense, but sometimes I think I could shoot you and watch you kick.Raymond Carver / quote ↗
07c. 1958 ADBut dying is for the sweetest ones. And he remembers sweetness, when life was sweet, and sweetly he was given that other lifetime.Raymond Carver / quote ↗
08c. 1958 ADWrite what you know, and what do you know better than your own secrets?Raymond Carver / quote ↗
09c. 1958 ADThis is awful. I don't know what's going to happen to me or to anyone else in the world.Raymond Carver / quote ↗
11c. 1958 ADThe places where water comes together with other water. Those places stand out in my mind like holy places.Raymond Carver / quote ↗
12c. 1958 ADThere was this funny thing of anything could happen now that we realized everything had.Raymond Carver / quote ↗
13c. 1958 ADThen 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.Raymond Carver / quote ↗
14c. 1958 ADLife 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 / quote ↗
