Raymond Carver · 544 pages
Rating: (18.3K votes)
“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, quote from Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories
“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.”
― Raymond Carver, quote from Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories
“Honey, no offense, but sometimes I think I could shoot you and watch you kick.”
― Raymond Carver, quote from Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories
“This is awful. I don't know what's going to happen to me or to anyone else in the world.”
― Raymond Carver, quote from Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories
“Booze takes a lot of time and effort if you're going to do a good job with it.”
― Raymond Carver, quote from Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories
“There was this funny thing of anything could happen now that we realized everything had.”
― Raymond Carver, quote from Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories
“I'm a heart surgeon, sure, but I'm just a mechanic. I go in and I fuck around and I fix things. Shit.”
― Raymond Carver, quote from Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories
“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 from Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories
“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, quote from Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories
“We knew our days were numbered. We had fouled up our lives and we were getting ready for a shake-up.”
― Raymond Carver, quote from Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories
“I'm moving to Nevada. Either there or kill myself.”
― Raymond Carver, quote from Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories
“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, quote from Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories
“That was in Crescent City, California, up near the Oregon border. I left soon after. But today I was thinking of that place, of Crescent City, and of how I was trying out a new life there with my wife, and how, in the barber's chair that morning, I had made up my mind to go. I was thinking today about the calm I felt when I closed my eyes and let the barber's fingers move through my hair, the sweetness of those fingers, the hair already starting to grow.”
― Raymond Carver, quote from Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories
“Booze takes a lot of time and effort if you’re going to do a good job with it.”
― Raymond Carver, quote from Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories
“That's right,' Mel said. 'Some vassal would come along and spear the bastard in the name of love. Or whatever the fuck it was they fought over in those days.'
Same things we fight over these days,' Terri said.
Laura said, 'Nothing's changed.”
― Raymond Carver, quote from Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories
“But here is the thing. When he gets on me, I suddenly feel I am fat. I feel am terrifically fat, so fat that Rudy is a tiny thing and hardly there at all.”
― Raymond Carver, quote from Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories
“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, quote from Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories
“Vorrei tanto essere come qualsiasi altro da queste parti - una persona normale, essenziale, senza particolari qualità - e salire su in camera, mettermi a letto e dormire.”
― Raymond Carver, quote from Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories
“What’s there to tell? The people over there embrace for a minute, and then they go inside the house together. They leave the light burning. Then they remember, and it goes out.”
― Raymond Carver, quote from Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories
“Be’... – disse lei, rigirandosi compiaciuta sulla schiena. – Mi piace mangiare roba buona, bistecche e patate rosolate, cose cosí. Mi piace leggere libri e riviste, viaggiare in treno di notte e quelle volte che ho viaggiato in aereo –. Fece una pausa. – Naturalmente non sto elencando le cose in ordine di preferenza. Dovrei pensarci meglio per elencarle in ordine di preferenza. Però mi piace, viaggiare in aereo. C’è un momento quando ci si stacca da terra in cui hai la sensazione che qualsiasi cosa succeda, andrà bene –. Gli passò una gamba sopra la caviglia. – Mi piace stare alzata fino a notte alta e poi restare a letto fino a tardi il giorno dopo. Vorrei tanto potessimo farlo sempre, invece che una volta ogni tanto. E poi mi piace il sesso. Mi piace essere toccata di tanto in tanto quando non me l’aspetto. Mi piace andare al cinema e farmi una birra con le amiche dopo. Mi piace avere amiche. Janice Hendricks mi piace un sacco. Mi piacerebbe andare a ballare almeno una volta a settimana. E avere sempre dei bei vestiti. Mi piacerebbe poter comprare bei vestiti anche per i bambini ogni volta che gli servono, senza dover aspettare. Per esempio Laurie ha bisogno di un vestito nuovo adesso per Pasqua. E mi piacerebbe comprare a Gary un completino o qualcosa del genere. Ormai è grandicello. Vorrei che anche tu avessi un completo nuovo. Anzi, tu ne hai veramente piú bisogno di Gary. E mi piacerebbe che avessimo una casa tutta nostra. Vorrei piantarla di traslocare ogni anno, due anni al massimo. Ma soprattutto vorrei tanto che io e te potessimo vivere una buona vita onesta, senza doverci sempre preoccupare dei conti, dei soldi e roba del genere. Ma tu dormi, – disse. – No che non dormo, – disse lui. – Non riesco a pensare ad altre cose. Ora tocca a te. Dimmi che cosa piacerebbe a te. – Non so. Un sacco di cose, – bofonchiò lui. – Be’, dimmele. Si fa tanto per parlare, no? – Vorrei tanto che mi lasciassi in pace, Nan –. Si rigirò dalla sua parte e lasciò penzolare il braccio oltre il bordo.”
― Raymond Carver, quote from Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories
Raymond Carver
Born place: in Clatskanie, Oregon, The United States
Born date May 25, 1938
See more on GoodReads
“The sound of distant breakers made her heart ache with melancholy. She was in the mood when the sea has a saddening effect upon the nerves. It is only when we are very happy that we can bear to gaze merrily upon the vast and limitless expanse of water, rolling on and on with such persistent, irritating monotony to the accompaniment of our thoughts, whether grave or gay. When they are gay, the waves echo their gaiety; but when they are sad, then every breaker, as it rolls, seems to bring additional sadness and to speak to us of hopelessness and of the pettiness of all our joys.”
― Emmuska Orczy, quote from The Scarlet Pimpernel
“The promise given was a necessity of the past: the word broken is a necessity of the present.”
― Niccolò Machiavelli, quote from The Prince
“I strive for nothing if not consistency”
― Brandon Sanderson, quote from The Final Empire
“One of the things I love about books is being able to define and condense certain portions of a character's life into chapters. It's intriguing, because you can't do this with real life. You can't just end a chapter, then skip the things you don't want to live through, only to open it up to a chapter that better suits your mood. Life can't be divided into chapters... only minutes. The events of your life are all crammed together one minute right after the other without any time lapses or blank pages or chapter breaks because no matter what happens life just keeps going and moving forward and words keep flowing and truths keep spewing whether you like it or not and life never lets you pause and just catch your fucking breath.
I need one of those chapter breaks. I just want to catch my breath, but I have no idea how.”
― Colleen Hoover, quote from Hopeless
“A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You've got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention (I started with 'Got To Get You Off My Mind', but then realised that she might not get any further than track one, side one if I delivered what she wanted straight away, so I buried it in the middle of side two), and then you've got to up it a notch, and you can't have white music and black music together, unless the white music sounds like black music, and you can't have two tracks by the same artist side by side, unless you've done the whole thing in pairs, and ... oh there are loads of rules.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from High Fidelity
Birds, Beasts and Re...
Dead City
Sleepwalking Land
A is for Abstinence
The Captain is Out t...
BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
