
“I can’t afford to regret. That life is simply gone now, and I can’t regret its passing. I have to live in the present. The life back then is gone just as surely—it’s as remote to me as if it had happened to somebody I read about in a nineteenth-century novel. I don’t spend more than five minutes a month in the past. The past really is a foreign country, and they do things differently there.”
Raymond Carver
more infosource: The Paris Review Interviews, vol. III (New York: Picador, 2008), 235.
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category: beautiful description, foreign country, past, present, regret
medium: interview
notes: Originally published in Issue 88 of The Paris Review, 1983.


regret