Raymond Carver Quotes

... sooner or later she had to give up the hope for a better past.

Every age yearns for a more beautiful world. The deeper the desperation and the depression about the confusing present, the more intense that yearning.

Maybe I wanted to hear it so badly that my ears betrayed my mind in order to secure my heart.

It may be that the seemingly intrinsic attraction that past time has for me is merely a desire for escapism, as I look out at the nation and world with little optimism.

I cannot sleep for dreaming; I cannot dream but I wake and walk about the house as though I'd find you coming through some door.

When I consider life, it is all a cheat. Yet fooled with hope, people favor this deceit.

We recognise that, with time, every human being will cease being, will only have been. And so we seek to resist time. We rebel against it. We are drawn like lovers to the unreachable past, to imagined memories, to nostalgia.

If I had one wish, I would say to be born in the '30s and be young in the '50s and '60s. It hurts my racing heart when I see things so far from what it was back then. I envy those guys so much.

We hope for the future, then we reach for the past.

Still desiring, we live without hope.

when you want something so desperately, you shake with the need for it. you tell yourself that you don't need more than one sip, because it's just the taste you crave, and once it's on your tongue you will be able to make it last alifetime. you dream of it at night. you see a thousand mile-high obstacles between where you stand and what you want, and you convince yourself you have the power to hurdle them. you tell yourself this even when, leaping the first block, you wind up bruised and bloodied and flattened.

Every night when I go to bed I think, In the morning I will wake up in my own house and things will be back the way they were. It hasn’t happened this morning, either.

It was mint and memories and the past and the future and she felt as if she’d done this before and already she longed to do it again.

Where the road sloped upward beyond the trees, I sat and looked toward the building where Naoko lived. It was easy to tell which room was hers. All I had to do was find the one window toward the back where a faint light trembled. I focused on that point of light for a long, long time. It made me think of something like the final throb of a soul's dying embers. I wanted to cup my hands over what was left and keep it alive. I went on watching the way Jay Gatsby watched that tiny light on the opposite shore night after night.

Can't repeat the past?" he cried incredulously. "Why of course you can!" He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.

Can we pretend that airplanes in the night sky are like shooting stars? I could really use a wish right now, wish right now, wish right now

Was there any human urge more pitiful-or more intense- than wanting another chance at something?

My heart shoots into my throat every time I think I see his loping walk, or catch sight of some floppy brown hair on a boy - but it's never him, and each time it isn't, my heart does a reverse trajectory down into the very pit of my stomach.

Hope is a memory that desires, the memory is a memory that has enjoyed.

When all else is lost and gone forever, there is yearning. Only desire trumps time.

And nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope.

The desire of the moth for the star, Of the night for the morrow, The devotion to something afar From the sphere of our sorrow.

I used to dream about him all the time," Sunny whispered to me. "Every night. I kept hoping the Seekers would find him; I missed him so much...When I saw him, I thought it was the old dream again.

My thoughts by night are often filled With visions false as fair: For in the past alone, I build My castles in the air.

Without hope we live in desire.