Top 100 Richard Brautigan Quotes
#2. The fish was a twelve-inch rainbow trout with a huge hump on its back. A hunchback trout.
Richard Brautigan
#3. He looked as if he'd got a lot of pleasure out of going ten rounds with your grandmother and making sure she went the whole distance.
Richard Brautigan
#4. With the rain falling
surgically against the roof,
I ate a dish of ice cream
that looked like Kafka's hat.
It was a dish of ice cream
tasting like an operating table
with the patient staring
up at the ceiling.
Richard Brautigan
#5. I'll think about things for thirty or forty years before I'll write it.
Richard Brautigan
#6. It's pretty hard to have faith when everybody is trying to lock you up.
Richard Brautigan
#7. The sun was like a huge 50-cent piece that someone had poured kerosene on and then had lit with a match, and said, "Here, hold this while I go get a newspaper," and put the coin in my hand, but never came back.
Richard Brautigan
#8. I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.
Richard Brautigan
#9. There wasn't a single thing in there that reminded me of my existence.
Richard Brautigan
#10. The two evening stars were now shining side by side. The smaller one had moved over to the big one. They were very close now, almost touching, and then they went together and become one very large star.
I don't know if things like that are fair or not.
Richard Brautigan
#11. There are spiders living comfortably in my house while the wind howls outside. They aren't bothering anybody. If I were a fly, I'd have second thoughts, but I'm not, so I don't.
Richard Brautigan
#12. The flies were teaching an advanced seminar in philosophy as they crawled up the crack of my ass
Richard Brautigan
#13. Moonlight drifts from over
A hundred thousand miles
To fall upon a cemetery
It reads a hundred epitaphs
And then smiles at a nest of
Baby owls
Richard Brautigan
#14. The time is right to mix sentences with dirt and the sun with punctuation and rain with verbs.
Richard Brautigan
#15. If you get hung up on everybody else's hang-ups, then the whole world's going to be nothing more than one huge gallows.
Richard Brautigan
#16. Punitive ghosts like steam-driven tennis courts
haunt the apples in my nonexistent orchard.
I remember when there were just worms out there
and they danced in moonlit cores on warm September
nights.
Richard Brautigan
#18. By the way, Doc Edwards said. How's that book coming along?
Oh, it's coming along.
Fine. What's it about?
Just what I'm writing down: one word after another.
Good.
Richard Brautigan
#19. The old drunk told me about trout fishing. When he could talk, he had a way of describing trout as if they were a precious and intelligent metal.
Richard Brautigan
#20. Once upon a time there was a dwarf knight who only had fifty words to live in and they were so fleeting that he only had time to put on a suit of armor and ride swiftly on a black horse into a very well-lit woods where he vanished forever.
Richard Brautigan
#22. I didn't know the full dimensions of forever, but I knew it was longer than waiting for Christmas to come.
Richard Brautigan
#23. I do not care to be esthetically tickled in a fancy theater surrounded by an audience drenched in the confident perfume of culture. I can't afford it.
Richard Brautigan
#24. All girls should have a poem
written for them even if
we have to turn this God-damn world
upside down to do it.
Richard Brautigan
#26. Probably the closest things to perfection are the huge absolutely empty holes that astronomers have recently discovered in space. If there's nothing there, how can anything go wrong?
Richard Brautigan
#27. Then they decided that the fleas that lived on Siamese cats would probably be more intelligent than the fleas that lived on just ordinary alley cats. It only made sense that drinking intelligent blood would make intelligent fleas.
Richard Brautigan
#29. If I Should Die Before You Do
When
you wake up
from death,
you will find yourself
in my arms,
and
I will be
kissing you,
and
I
will be crying.
Richard Brautigan
#30. There was a fine thing about that trout. I only wish I could have made a death mask of him. Not of his body though, but of his energy. I don't know if anyone would have understood his body. I put it in my creel.
Richard Brautigan
#32. I have always wanted to write a book that ended with the word 'mayonnaise.
Richard Brautigan
#33. He learned about life at sixteen, first from Dostoevsky and then from the whores of New Orleans.
Richard Brautigan
#34. He created his own Kool Aid reality and was able to illuminate himself by it.
Richard Brautigan
#36. The only thing he likes better than a nice juicy homicide is a sirloin steak smothered with onions.
Richard Brautigan
#37. I know that we are surrounded by so much blossoming horror in the world that three puppies wandering off isn't very much, but I worry about it and see this simple event as the possible telescope for a larger agony.
Richard Brautigan
#38. I saw thousands of pumpkins last night
come floating in on the tide,
bumping up against the rocks and
rolling up on the beaches;
it must be Halloween in the sea
Richard Brautigan
#39. Somebody should have taken him to a stationary store and pointed out the difference between an envelope and a whore.
Richard Brautigan
#40. The heart is something else. Nobody knows what's going to happen,' I said
Richard Brautigan
#41. I feel horrible. She doesn't
love me and I wander around
the house like a sewing machine
that's just finished sewing
a turd to a garbage can lid.
Richard Brautigan
#42. Love Poem
It's so nice
to wake up in the morning
all alone
and not have to tell somebody
you love them
when you don't love them
any more.
Richard Brautigan
#43. "I count a lot of things that there's no need to count," Cameron said. "Just because that's the way I am. But I count all the things that need to be counted."
Richard Brautigan
#44. She wore a loose bathrobe that covered up a body that would have won first prize in a beauty contest for cement blocks ... She had a voice that made pearl harbour sound like a lullaby.
Richard Brautigan
#45. We walked back to iDEATH, holding hands. Hands are very nice things, especially after they have travelled back from making love.
Richard Brautigan
#46. If you are thinking about something that happened a long time ago:
Somebody asked you a question and you did not know the answer.
That is my name.
Richard Brautigan
#47. Deer Tracks:
Beautiful, sobbing
high-geared fucking
and then to lie silently
like deer tracks in the
freshly-fallen snow beside
the one you love.
That's all.
Richard Brautigan
#48. Hinged to forgetfulness like a door,
she slowly closed out of sight,
and she was the woman I loved,
but too many times she slept like
a mechanical deer in my caresses,
and I ached in the metal silence
of her dreams.
Richard Brautigan
#51. Elizabeth's voice had a door in it. When you opened that door you found another door, and that door opened yet another door. All the doors were nice and led out of her.
Richard Brautigan
#52. It was not an outhouse resting upon the imagination. It was reality.
Richard Brautigan
#55. I feel as if I am an ad
for the sale of a haunted house:
18 rooms
$37,000
I'm yours
ghosts and all.
Richard Brautigan
#56. Her hand had a lot of strength gained through the process of gentleness.
Richard Brautigan
#59. The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster
When you take your pill
it's like a mine disaster.
I think of all the people
lost inside you.
Richard Brautigan
#60. I guess some people lived like Reader's Digest, but I hadn't met any and at that time it seemed doubtful that I ever would
Richard Brautigan
#61. Excuse me, I said. I thought you were a trout stream.
I'm not, she said.
Richard Brautigan
#62. I was too young and naive then to link up the meaning of those ridiculingly defunct tennis shoes that I was forced to wear with the reality that we were on Welfare and Welfare was not designed to provide a child with any pride in its existence.
Richard Brautigan
#63. THE NECESSITY OF APPEARING IN YOUR OWN FACE
There are days when that is the last place
in the world that you want to be but you
have to be there, like a movie, because it
features you.
Richard Brautigan
#64. My sperm came out into the water, unaccustomed to the light, and instantly it became a misty, stringy kind of thing and swirled out like a falling star, and I saw a dead fish come forward and float into my sperm, bending it in the middle.
Richard Brautigan
#65. People need a little loving and, God, sometimes it's sad all the shit they have to go through to find some.
Richard Brautigan
#66. A friend came over to the house
a few days ago and read one of my poems.
He came back today and asked to read the
same poem over again. After he finished
reading it, he said, It makes me want to write poetry.
Richard Brautigan
#67. Sometimes life is merely a matter of coffee and whatever intimacy a cup of coffee affords.
Richard Brautigan
#68. I don't want my daughter to be educated. I think women should just be decorative.
Richard Brautigan
#69. There was something dead in my heart.
I tried to figure out what it was by the strength of the smell. I knew that it was not a lion or a sheep or a dog. Using logical deduction, I came to the conclusion that it was a mouse.
I had a dead mouse in my heart.
Richard Brautigan
#70. The sweet juices of your mouth
are like castles bathed in honey.
i've never had it done so gently before.
you have put a circle of castles
around my penis and you swirl them
like sunlight on the wings of birds.
Richard Brautigan
#71. What makes you older is when your bones, muscles and blood wear out, when the heart sinks into oblivion and all the houses you ever lived in are gone and people are not really certain that your civilization ever existed.
Richard Brautigan
#72. I read the note and it did not please me and I threw it away, so not even time could find it.
Richard Brautigan
#73. The Coleman lantern is the symbol of the camping craze that is currently sweeping America, with its unholy white light burning in the forests of America.
Richard Brautigan
#74. I believe I saw a woodcock. He had a long bill like putting a fire hydrant into a pencil sharpener, then pasting it onto a bird and letting the bird fly away in front of me with this thing on its face for no other purpose than to amaze me.
Richard Brautigan
#75. There are seductions that should be in the Smithsonian Institute, right next to The Spirit of St. Louis.
Richard Brautigan
#76. I fished upstream coming ever closer and closer to the narrow staircase of the canyon. Then I went up into it as if I were entering a department store. I caught three trout in the lost and found department.
Richard Brautigan
#77. He used sweet wine in place of life because he didn't have any more life to use.
Richard Brautigan
#78. Voluntary Quicksand
I read the Chronicle this morning
as if I were stepping into voluntary
quicksand
and watched the news go over my shoes
with forty-four more days of spring.
Kent State
America
May 7, 1970
Richard Brautigan
#79. After he graduated from college, he went to Paris and became an Existentialist. He had a photograph taken of Existentialism and himself sitting at a sidewalk cafe. Pard was wearing a beard and he looked as if he had a huge soul, with barely enough room in his body to contain it.
Richard Brautigan
#80. Finding is losing something else. I think about, perhaps even mourn, what I lost to find this
Richard Brautigan
#81. The Forgotten Works just go on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on. You get the picture. It's a big place, much bigger than we are.
Richard Brautigan
#82. You're not fooling anyone by taking your clothes off when you go to bed.
Richard Brautigan
#83. Warm fog swirled in the canyon as we gradually descended. A hundred feet in front of us everything was lost in the fog and a hundred feet behind us everything was lost in the fog. We were walking in a capsule between amnesias.
Richard Brautigan
#84. I drank coffee and read old books and waited for the year to end.
Richard Brautigan
#85. If you will die for me, I will die for you and our graves will be like two lovers washing their clothes together in a laundromat If you will bring the soap I will bring the bleach.
Richard Brautigan
#86. I walked home past the glass whiskers of the houses, reflecting the downward rushing waterfalls of night.
Richard Brautigan
#87. My God, ma'am, you're so pretty I'd walk ten miles barefooted on a freezing morning to stand in your shit.
Richard Brautigan
#88. One spring afternoon as a child in the strange town of Portland, I walked down to a different street corner, and saw a row of old houses, huddled together like seals on a rock.
Richard Brautigan
#89. I'll affect you slowly
as if you were having a picnic in a dream.
There will be no ants.
It won't rain.
Richard Brautigan
#92. Watcha doin? If you're like me, you're doin nothin, but you're doin it so well that everybody thinks you're doin somethin.
Richard Brautigan
#93. While discussing the monster:
"It sounds like the combination of water being poured into a glass," Miss Hawkline said, "A dog barking and the muttering of a drunk parrot. And very, very loud."
"I think we're going to need the shotgun for this one," Cameron said.
Richard Brautigan
#94. There are not too many fables about man's misuse of sunflower seeds.
Richard Brautigan
#95. We looked like a parade barely moving toward YOU MIGHT GET LOST.
Richard Brautigan
#96. It's strange how the simple things in life go on while we become more difficult.
Richard Brautigan
#97. Night was coming on in, borrowing the light. It had started out borrowing just a few cents worth of the light, but now it was borrowing thousands of dollars worth of the light every second. The light would soon be gone, the bank closed, the tellers unemployed, the bank president a suicide.
Richard Brautigan
#98. The smallest snowstorm on record took place an hour ago in my back yard. It was approximately two flakes. I waited for more to fall, but that was it. The entire storm was two flakes.
Richard Brautigan
#99. Now it was close to sunset and the earth was beginning to cool off in the manner of eternity and office girls were returning like penguins from Montgomery Street.
Richard Brautigan
#100. Just because people love your mind, doesn't mean they have to have your body, too
Richard Brautigan
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