What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

Raymond Carver writes in the sparsest, most blunt way. I suppose that is mostly what minimalism is about, but his writing is gut-wrenchingly painful (in a good, honest way). These quotes are from one of his collections of short stories.


From "Why Don't You Dance?":
"They drank. They listened to the record. And then the man put on another."

"He felt her breath on his neck.
'I hope you like your bed,' he said.
The girl closed and then opened her eyes. She pushed her face into the man's shoulder. She pulled the man closer.
'You must be desperate or something,' she said."

From "Viewfinder":
"So why would I want a photograph of this tragedy?"

"I waved, and the man with no hands waved back with his hooks."


From "Gazebo":
"I feel so awful from one thing and the other."

"'Something's died in me,' she goes. 'It took a long time for it to do it, but it's dead. You've killed something, just like you took an axe to it. Everything is dirt now.'"

"This is awful. I don't know what's going to happen to me or anyone else in the world."

"Drinking's funny. When I look back on it, all of our important decisions have been figured out when we were drinking. Even when we talked about having to cut back on our drinking, we'd be sitting at the kitchen table or out at the picnic table with a six-pack or whiskey."

"Well, the truth is we were both hitting it pretty hard. Booze takes a lot of time and effort if you're going to do a good job with it."

"There was this funny thing of anything could happen now that we realized everything had."

From "I Could See The Smallest Things":
"A plane passed overhead. I imagined the people on it sitting belted in their seats, some of them reading, some of them staring down at the ground."

"'I quit, you know,' Sam said. 'Had to. For a while it was getting so I didn't know up from down. We still keep it around the house, but I don't have much to do with it anymore.'"

"I thought for a minute of the world outside my house, and then I didn't have any more thoughts except the thought that I had to hurry up and sleep."

From "After the Denim":
"'When are you going to stop?' he said, lighting his cigarette after he'd lighted hers.
'When you stop,' she said. 'I'll stop when you stop. Just like it was when you stopped drinking. Like that. Like you.'"

"'Don't you pay it any attention,' she said. 'They're not hurting anybody. They're just young, that's all.'"

"She held her lips pursed together. It could mean anything-- resolve, worry, pain. Or maybe she just liked having her lips that way for this particular game."

From "Sacks":
"'Everyone's fine,' I said. Which was not the truth."

"But it was all over in no time at all. And afterwards she says, 'You must think I'm a whore or something,' and then she just goes."

From "The Bath":
"Sleeping is the same wherever you do it."

"She saw a car stop and a woman in a long coat get into it. She made believe she was that woman. She made believe she was driving away from here to someplace else."

From "A Serious Talk":
"'When did you start keeping vodka in the freezer?'
'Don't ask.'
'Okay,' he said, 'I won't ask.'"

"'I wanted to say I was sorry.'
She said, 'You said that.'"

"'What about me,' he said. 'You think I look forward to holidays?'"

From "Everything Stuck To Him":
"Things change, he says. I don't know how they do. But they do without your realizing it or wanting them to."

From "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love":
"'What do you do with love like that?'"

"You should have seen the way we lived in those days. Like fugitives."

"In addition to being in love, we like each other and enjoy one another's company. She's easy to be with."

"'I was in the room with him when he died,' Terri said. 'He never came up out of it. But I sat with him. He didn't have anyone else.'"

"'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.'"

"'And the terrible thing, the terrible thing is, but the good thing too, the saving grace, you might say, is that if something happened to one of us--excuse me for saying this--but if something happened to one of us tomorrow, I think the other one, the other person, would grieve for a while, you know, but then the surviving party would go out and love again, have someone else soon enough. All this, all of this love we're talking about, it would just be a memory. Maybe not even a memory.'"

"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."