Raymond Carver

Happiness. It comes onunexpectedly. And goes beyond, really,any early morning talk about it.

I'm moving to Nevada. Either there or kill myself.

Nights without beginning that had no end. Talking about a past as if it'd really happened. Telling themselves that this time next year, this time next year, things were going to be different.

And the terrible thing, the terrible thing is, but the good thing too, the saving grace, 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.

Grief"Woke up early this morning and from my bedlooked far across the Strait to seea small boat moving through the choppy water,a single running light on. Rememberedmy friend who used to shouthis dead wife__ name from hilltopsaround Perugia. Who set a platefor her at his simple table long aftershe was gone. And opened the windowsso she could have fresh air. Such displayI found embarrassing. So did his otherfriends. I couldn__ see it.Not until this morning.

They talked on into the early morning, the high, pale cast of light in the windows, and they did not think of leaving.

I'm always learning something. Learning never ends.

When you live in the dark for so long, you begin to love it. And it loves you back, and isn__ that the point? You think, the face turns to the shadows, and just as well. It accepts, it heals, it allows.But it also devours.

I don't fire up the prose. I just tell it straight and don't fool around with it.

They had laughed. They had leaned on each other and laughed until the tears had come, while everything else--the cold, and where he'd go in it--was outside, for a while anyway.

It ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we're talking about when we talk about love.

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.

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.

I'm a heart surgeon, sure, but I'm just a mechanic. I go in and I fuck around and I fix things. Shit.

We knew our days were numbered. We had fouled up our lives and we were getting ready for a shake-up.

Dreams, you know, are what you wake up from.

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.

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.