193 Quotes by Raymond Carver

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.

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.

Things change, he says. I don’t know how they do. But they do without your realizing it or wanting them to.

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

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.

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.

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.

A small wax and sawdust log burned on the grate. A carton of five more sat ready on the hearth. He got up from the sofa and put them all in the fireplace. He watched until they flamed. Then he finished his soda and made for the patio door. On the way, he saw the pies lined up on the sideboard. He stacked them in his arms, all six, one for every ten times she had ever betrayed him.

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.