Raymond Carver
Raymond Carver
Raymond Clevie Carver, Jr.was an American short-story writer and poet. Carver contributed to the revitalization of the American short story in literature during the 1980s...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth25 May 1938
CityClatskanie, OR
CountryUnited States of America
dream morning insomnia
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.
writing admire wells
You're...writing for other writers to an extent-the dead writers whose work you admire, as well as the living writers you like to read.
writing literature crafts
There are significant moments in everyone's day that can make literature. That's what you ought to write about.
hate wife wish
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.
worry anxiety fidgeting
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.
dream wake-up knows
Dreams, you know, are what you wake up from.
water mind together
The places where water comes together with other water. Those places stand out in my mind like holy places.
ifs
He wondered if she wondered if he were watching her.
water life-and-death rising
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.
i-love-you want earth
And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.
love moving heart
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.
writing insightful stories
It's possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring—with immense, even startling power.
writing heart character
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.
long chance enough
there isn't enough of anything as long as we live. But at intervals a sweetness appears and, given a chance prevails.