Top 100 Brautigan Quotes
#1. You know, when you're young, you have moments of such happiness, you think you're living in someplace magical, like Atlantis must have been. Then we grow up, and our hearts break in two."
Ted Brautigan, Hearts in Atlantis
Deyth Banger
#2. It's true that at the time I was fond of Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan, and it was from them that I learned about this kind of simple, swift-paced style, but the main reason for the style of my first novel is that I simply did not have the time to write sustained prose.
Haruki Murakami
#5. For the rest of my life I'll be thinking about that hamburger. I'll be sitting there at the counter, holding it in my hands with tears streaming down my cheeks. The waitress will be looking away because she doesn't like to see kids crying when they are eating hamburgers ...
Richard Brautigan
#6. The fish was a twelve-inch rainbow trout with a huge hump on its back. A hunchback trout.
Richard Brautigan
#7. I had a good-talking candle last night in my bedroom. I was very tired but I wanted somebody to be with me, so I lit a candle and listened to its comfortable voice of light until I was asleep.
Richard Brautigan
#8. I remember mistaking an old woman for a trout stream in Vermont, and I had to beg her pardon.
Richard Brautigan
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. I'll think about things for thirty or forty years before I'll write it.
Richard Brautigan
#12. It's pretty hard to have faith when everybody is trying to lock you up.
Richard Brautigan
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. For fear you will be alone you do so many things that aren't you at all.
Richard Brautigan
#16. There wasn't a single thing in there that reminded me of my existence.
Richard Brautigan
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. The flies were teaching an advanced seminar in philosophy as they crawled up the crack of my ass
Richard Brautigan
#20. 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
#21. The time is right to mix sentences with dirt and the sun with punctuation and rain with verbs.
Richard Brautigan
#22. 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
#23. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#29. I didn't know the full dimensions of forever, but I knew it was longer than waiting for Christmas to come.
Richard Brautigan
#30. 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
#31. 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
#33. 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
#34. Because you always have a clock strapped to your body, it's natural that i should think of you as the correct time: with your long blonde hair at 8:03, and your pulse-lightning breasts at 11:17, and your rose-meow smile at 5:30, i know i'm right.
Richard Brautigan
#35. We could see the children's toys here and there, and we saw a game that the children had made themselves out of dirt, deer antlers and abalone shells, but the game was so strange that only children could tell what it was. Perhaps it wasn't a game at all, only the grave of a game.
Richard Brautigan
#36. 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
#38. I daydream about a high school where everybody plays the harmonica: the students, the teachers, the principal, the janitor and the cook in the cafeteria.
Richard Brautigan
#39. 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
#40. 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
#42. I have always wanted to write a book that ended with the word 'mayonnaise.
Richard Brautigan
#43. He learned about life at sixteen, first from Dostoevsky and then from the whores of New Orleans.
Richard Brautigan
#44. He created his own Kool Aid reality and was able to illuminate himself by it.
Richard Brautigan
#46. He looked as if he had been beaten to death with a wine bottle, but by doing it with the contents of the bottle.
Richard Brautigan
#47. The only thing he likes better than a nice juicy homicide is a sirloin steak smothered with onions.
Richard Brautigan
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. Somebody should have taken him to a stationary store and pointed out the difference between an envelope and a whore.
Richard Brautigan
#52. In Watermelon Sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar.
Richard Brautigan
#53. You've got
some 'Star-Spangled'
nails
in your coffin, kid.
That's what
they've done for you,
son.
Richard Brautigan
#54. The heart is something else. Nobody knows what's going to happen,' I said
Richard Brautigan
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. "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
#58. 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
#59. We walked back to iDEATH, holding hands. Hands are very nice things, especially after they have travelled back from making love.
Richard Brautigan
#60. The thought of her hands
touching his hair
makes me want to vomit.
Richard Brautigan
#61. 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
#62. I thought about it for awhile, hiding it from the rest of my mind. But I didn't ruin my birthday by secretly thinking about it too hard
Richard Brautigan
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. Let us pretend that my mind is a taxi ... and suddenly you are riding in it.
Richard Brautigan
#66. When he said this, it was not a form of criticism. It was just a simple observation that led to another bite from the movie on his plate called The Old Man and the Stew.
Richard Brautigan
#69. 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
#70. It was not an outhouse resting upon the imagination. It was reality.
Richard Brautigan
#73. 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
#74. In a Cafe
I watched a man in a cafe fold a slice of bread as if he were folding a birth certificate or looking at the photograph of a dead lover.
Richard Brautigan
#75. Her hand had a lot of strength gained through the process of gentleness.
Richard Brautigan
#77. The girl was very pretty and her body was like a clear mountain river of skin and muscle flowing over rocks of bone and hidden nerves.
Richard Brautigan
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. Excuse me, I said. I thought you were a trout stream.
I'm not, she said.
Richard Brautigan
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. The Beautiful Poem
I go to bed in Los Angeles thinking
about you.
Pissing a few moments ago
I looked down at my penis
affectionately.
Knowing it has been inside
you twice today makes me
feel beautiful.
Richard Brautigan
#85. 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
#86. People need a little loving and, God, sometimes it's sad all the shit they have to go through to find some.
Richard Brautigan
#87. 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
#88. Sometimes life is merely a matter of coffee and whatever intimacy a cup of coffee affords.
Richard Brautigan
#89. I don't want my daughter to be educated. I think women should just be decorative.
Richard Brautigan
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. Burn all the maps to your body. I'm not here of my own choosing.
Richard Brautigan
#94. I read the note and it did not please me and I threw it away, so not even time could find it.
Richard Brautigan
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. There are seductions that should be in the Smithsonian Institute, right next to The Spirit of St. Louis.
Richard Brautigan
#98. Boo, Forever Spinning like a ghost on the bottom of a top, I'm haunted by all the space that I will live without you.
Richard Brautigan
#99. 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
#100. A Boat O beautiful was the werewolf in his evil forest. We took him to the carnival and he started crying when he saw the Ferris wheel. Electric green and red tears flowed down his furry cheeks. He looked like a boat out on the dark water.
Richard Brautigan
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