Quotes from Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

Raymond Carver ·  181 pages

Rating: (11.3K votes)


“He wondered if she wondered if he were watching her.”
― Raymond Carver, quote from Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?


“Ralph also took some classes in philosophy and literature and felt himself on the brink of some kind of huge discovery about himself. But it never came.”
― Raymond Carver, quote from Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?


“It is August.
My life is going to change. I feel it.”
― Raymond Carver, quote from Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?


“I lifted him out. I held him. I held that half of him.”
― Raymond Carver, quote from Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?


“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, quote from Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?



“You sound like a nice man,” the woman said. “Do I? Well, that’s nice of you to say.” He knew he should hang up now, but it was good to hear a voice, even his own, in the quiet room.”
― Raymond Carver, quote from Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?


“Though he continued to take classes here and there in the sciences and in business, Ralph also took some classes in philosophy and literature and felt himself on the brink of some kind of huge discovery about himself. But it never came.”
― Raymond Carver, quote from Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?


About the author

Raymond Carver
Born place: in Clatskanie, Oregon, The United States
Born date May 25, 1938
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Popular quotes

“هر عقیده‌ای که از دیگران رسیده و قبول‌شده باشد، فکر احمقانه‌ای بیش نیست، زیرا بافکر اکثریت مردم سازگار آمده است.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, quote from Tales of Mystery and Imagination


“Amongst the monsters, I am well hidden; who looks for a leaf in a forest?”
― Angela Carter, quote from Nights at the Circus


“sometimes our lives have moments of great disappointment. It’s difficult at the time, but we have to move beyond.”
― Nicky Charles, quote from The Mating


“It seems very straightforward when I say “I.” At the time, “I” meant Justice of Toren, the whole ship and all its ancillaries. A unit might be very focused on what it was doing at that particular moment, but it was no more apart from “me” than my hand is while it’s engaged in a task that doesn’t require my full attention. Nearly twenty years later “I” would be a single body, a single brain. That division, I–Justice of Toren and I–One Esk, was not, I have come to think, a sudden split, not an instant before which “I” was one and after which “I” was “we.” It was something that had always been possible, always potential. Guarded against. But how did it go from potential to real, incontrovertible, irrevocable? On one level the answer is simple—it happened when all of Justice of Toren but me was destroyed. But when I look closer I seem to see cracks everywhere. Did the singing contribute, the thing that made One Esk different from all other units on the ship, indeed in the fleets? Perhaps. Or is anyone’s identity a matter of fragments held together by convenient or useful narrative, that in ordinary circumstances never reveals itself as a fiction? Or is it really a fiction? I don’t know the answer. But I do know that, though I can see hints of the potential split going back a thousand years or more, that’s only hindsight. The first I noticed even the bare possibility that I–Justice of Toren might not also be I–One Esk, was that moment that Justice of Toren edited One Esk’s memory of the slaughter in the temple of Ikkt. The moment I—“I”—was surprised by it.”
― Ann Leckie, quote from Ancillary Justice


“I’m giving you your freedom tonight, Ashton. So fucking take it.” I don’t regret a second of it. Not as he flips me onto my back. Not as he pushes into my body without hesitation. Not as I cry out with that moment of pain. And certainly not as he claims his freedom. And gives me a part of mine.”
― K.A. Tucker, quote from One Tiny Lie


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