Top 100 Raymond Carver Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Things change, he says. I don’t know how they do. But they do without your realizing it or wanting them to.”

— Raymond Carver

52. “Anyone can express himself or herself, but what writers and poets want to do in their work, more than simply express themselves, is communicate.”

— Raymond Carver

53. “He understood that it only took one lunatic and a torch to bring everything to ruin.”

— Raymond Carver

54. “There is no God, and conversation is a dying art.”

— Raymond Carver

55. “We opened our eyes and turned in bed to take a good look at each other. We both knew it then. We’d reached the end of something, and the thing was to find out where new to start.”

— Raymond Carver

56. “He wondered if she wondered if he were watching her.”

— Raymond Carver

57. “Maybe once, maybe years ago, I was a different kind of human being. I’ve forgotten, I don’t know for sure.”

— Raymond Carver

58. “Remember Haydn’s 104 symphonies. Not all of them were great. But there were 104 of them.”

— Raymond Carver

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

— Raymond Carver

60. “When you live in the dark for so long, you begin to love it. And it loves you back, and isn’t that the point? You think, the face turns to the shadows, and just as well. It accepts, it heals, it allows. But it also devours.”

— Raymond Carver

61. “I am a cigarette with a body attached to it.”

— Raymond Carver

62. “She kept talking. She told everyone. There was more to it, and she was trying to get it talked out. After a time, she quit trying.”

— Raymond Carver

63. “In short, everything about his life was different for him at the bottom of that well.”

— Raymond Carver

64. “Then i don’t know I remembered how he was when he was nineteen, the way he looked, running across this field to where his dad sat on a tractor, hand over his eyes, watching Wes run toward him – Chef’s House.”

— Raymond Carver

65. “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

66. “He was going somewhere, he knew that. And if it was the wrong direction, sooner or later he’d find it out.”

— Raymond Carver

67. “In addition to being in love, we like each other and enjoy one another’s company.”

— Raymond Carver

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

— Raymond Carver

69. “Suppose I say summer, write the word “hummingbird”, put it in an envelope, take it down the hill to the box. When you open my letter you will recall those days and how much, just how much, I love you.”

— Raymond Carver

70. “You’ll be surprised to see what can collect in a mattress over the months, over the years. Every day, every night of our lives, we’re leaving little bits of ourselves, flakes of this and that, behind. Where do they go, these bits and pieces of ourselves? Right through the sheets and into the mattress, that’s where! Pillows, too. It’s all the same. He.”

— Raymond Carver

71. “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.”

— Raymond Carver

72. “The light was draining out of the room, going back through the window where it had come from.”

— Raymond Carver

73. “I knocked stuff out of the medicine cabinet. Things rolled into the sink. ‘Where’s the aspirin?’ I said. I knocked down more things. I didn’t care. ‘Goddamn it,’ I said. Things kept falling.”

— Raymond Carver

74. “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

75. “What good are insights? They only make things worse.”

— Raymond Carver

76. “I think a little menace is fine to have in a story. For one thing, it’s good for the circulation.”

— Raymond Carver

77. “But I guess even the knights were vessels to someone. Isn’t that the way it worked? But then everyone is always a vessel to someone.”

— Raymond Carver

78. “It’s seldom anything turns out to be better than you expected it to be. Usually it’s the other way around.”

— Raymond Carver

79. “A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.”

— Raymond Carver

80. “I wish I could be like everybody else in this neighborhood – your basic, normal, unaccomplished person-and go up to my bedroom, and lie down, and sleep. It’s going to be a big day today, and I’d like to be ready for it. I wish I could sleep and wake up and find everything in my life different. Not necessarily just the big things,... but things clearly within my power.”

— Raymond Carver

81. “I love you, Bro.”

— Raymond Carver

82. “In those olden days, when they built cathedrals, men wanted to be close to God.”

— Raymond Carver

83. “I want to hide from it, that’s what I want to do. I want to just close my eyes and let it pass by. Let it take the next man.”

— Raymond Carver

84. “But he understood it was over, and he felt able to let her go. He was sure their life together had happened in the way he said it had. But it was something that had passed. And that passing – though it seemed impossible and he’d fought against it – would become part of him now, too, as surely as anything else he’d left behind.”

— Raymond Carver

85. “Today, my heart, like the front door, stands open for the first time in months.”

— Raymond Carver

86. “He left through the patio door. He was not certain, but he thought he had proved something. He hoped he had made something clear. The thing was, they had to have a serious talk soon. There were things that needed talking about, important things that had to be discussed. They’d talk again. Maybe after the holidays were over and things got back to normal. He’d tell her the goddamn ashtray was a goddamn dish, for example.”

— Raymond Carver

87. “You have to have been in love to write poetry.”

— Raymond Carver

88. “I lifted him out. I held him. I held that half of him.”

— Raymond Carver

89. “Physical love, that impulse that drives you to someone special, as well as love of the other person’s being, his or her essence, as it were. Carnal love and, well, call it sentimental love, the day-to-day caring about the other person.”

— Raymond Carver

90. “I thought for a minute of the world outside my house, and then I didn’t have any more thoughts except the thought that I had to hurry up and sleep.”

— Raymond Carver

91. “I don’t fire up the prose. I just tell it straight and don’t fool around with it.”

— Raymond Carver

92. “You see, this happened a few months ago, but it’s still going on right now, and it ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we’re talking about when we talk about love.”

— Raymond Carver

93. “It made him feel older, having married friends.”

— Raymond Carver

94. “It’s funny how we can be in love with someone one day, and the next we can easily fall in love with someone else.”

— Raymond Carver

95. “There’s literary creation and literary business. When I first got something accepted, it gave my life a validation it didn’t otherwise have.”

— Raymond Carver

96. “A great danger, or at least a great temptation, for many writers is to become too autobiographical in their approach to their fiction. A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.”

— Raymond Carver

97. “I’d like to go out in the front yard and shout something. “None of this is worth it!” That’s what I’d like people to hear.”

— Raymond Carver

98. “He did not know what to do. Not just now, he thought, not just in this, not just about this, today and tomorrow, but every day on the earth.”

— Raymond Carver

99. “I don’t know why, but I suddenly felt a long way away from everybody I had known and loved when I was a girl. I missed people. For a minute I stood there and wished I could get back to that time. Then with my next thought I understood clearly that I couldn’t do that. No. But it came to me then that my life did not remotely resemble the life I thought I’d have when I had been young and looking ahead to things.”

— Raymond Carver

100. “We knew our days were numbered. We had fouled up our lives and we were getting ready for a shake-up.”

— Raymond Carver