The collection / 38 fragments

The living archive

Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

SearchTypeTopicEraCulture / collection labelCountry attributionTraditionOrder

Author

Leave empty for every voice. Browse all authors ↗

Culture labels and country attributions follow the source collections; earliest origins may be unknown.

38 results · Page 2 of 2Play this collection ▷

01Undated

And 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

02Undated

Nights 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

03Undated

I'm moving to Nevada. Either there or kill myself.

Raymond Carver / quote

04Undated

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.

Raymond Carver / quote

05Undated

If 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

06Undated

Honey, no offense, but sometimes I think I could shoot you and watch you kick.

Raymond Carver / quote

07Undated

But 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

08Undated

Write what you know, and what do you know better than your own secrets?

Raymond Carver / quote

09Undated

This is awful. I don't know what's going to happen to me or to anyone else in the world.

Raymond Carver / quote

10Undated

I lifted him out. I held him. I held that half of him.

Raymond Carver / quote

11Undated

The places where water comes together with other water. Those places stand out in my mind like holy places.

Raymond Carver / quote

12Undated

There was this funny thing of anything could happen now that we realized everything had.

Raymond Carver / quote

13Undated

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.

Raymond Carver / quote

14Undated

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 / quote