"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. Th..."
- Raymond Carver
"It ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we're talking about when we talk about love."
"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 harm..."
"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."
"there isn't enough of anythingas long as we live. But at intervalsa sweetness appears and, given a chanceprevails."
"Happiness. It comes onunexpectedly. And goes beyond, really,any early morning talk about it."
"That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones."
"It's possible, in a poem or a 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,..."
"My circumstances of unrelieved responsibility and permanent distraction necessitated the short story form."
"Evan Connell said once that he knew he was finished with a short story when he found himself going through it and taking out commas and then going through the story again and putting the commas back i..."