Richard Brautigan Quotes

I remember mistaking an old woman for a trout stream in Vermont, and I had to beg her pardon.

I'm in a constant process of thinking about things.

God-forsaken is beautiful, too.

I walked home past the glass whiskers of the houses, reflecting the downward rushing waterfalls of night.

All of us have a place in history. mine is clouds.

He was leaving for America, often only a place in the mind.

USED TROUT STREAM FOR SALE.
MUST BE SEEN TO BE APPRECIATED.

He used sweet wine in place of life because he didn't have any more life to use.

Burn all the maps to your body. I'm not here of my own choosing.

Let us pretend that my mind is a taxi ... and suddenly you are riding in it.

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

The bees in my stomach are dead and getting used to it.

My God, ma'am, you're so pretty I'd walk ten miles barefooted on a freezing morning to stand in your shit.

Thousands of graveyards were parked in rows like cars.

There are not too many fables about man's misuse of sunflower seeds.

All girls should have a poem
written for them even if
we have to turn this God-damn world
upside down to do it.

The only thing he likes better than a nice juicy homicide is a sirloin steak smothered with onions.

We looked like a parade barely moving toward YOU MIGHT GET LOST.

You're not fooling anyone by taking your clothes off when you go to bed.

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.

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.

People need a little loving and, God, sometimes it's sad all the shit they have to go through to find some.

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.

I'll affect you slowly
as if you were having a picnic in a dream.
There will be no ants.
It won't rain.

Finding is losing something else. I think about, perhaps even mourn, what I lost to find this

Sometimes life is merely a matter of coffee and whatever intimacy a cup of coffee affords.

I have always wanted to write a book that ended with the word 'mayonnaise.

I'll think about things for thirty or forty years before I'll write it.

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.

Excuse me, I said. I thought you were a trout stream.
I'm not, she said.

I don't want my daughter to be educated. I think women should just be decorative.

One day
Time will die
And love will bury it

Money is sad shit

Her hand had a lot of strength gained through the process of gentleness.

He looked as if he had been beaten to death with a wine bottle, but by doing it with the contents of the bottle.

He learned about life at sixteen, first from Dostoevsky and then from the whores of New Orleans.

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

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.

You've got
some 'Star-Spangled'
nails
in your coffin, kid.
That's what
they've done for you,
son.

It's pretty hard to have faith when everybody is trying to lock you up.

Just because people love your mind, doesn't mean they have to have your body, too

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.

It was not an outhouse resting upon the imagination. It was reality.

I didn't know the full dimensions of forever, but I knew it was longer than waiting for Christmas to come.

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.

It's strange how the simple things in life go on while we become more difficult.

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.

He created his own Kool Aid reality and was able to illuminate himself by it.

The heart is something else. Nobody knows what's going to happen,' I said

The thought of her hands
touching his hair
makes me want to vomit.

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.

The fish was a twelve-inch rainbow trout with a huge hump on its back. A hunchback trout.

The flies were teaching an advanced seminar in philosophy as they crawled up the crack of my ass

Language does not leave fossils, at least not until it has become written.

In Watermelon Sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar.

Her sunny side was always up.

She had a voice that made Pearl Harbor seem like a lullaby.

Put the coffee on, bubbles, I'm coming home

The time is right to mix sentences with dirt and the sun with punctuation and rain with verbs.

I'll tell you about it because I am here and you are distant.

Our names were made for us in another century.

Reduce intellectual and emotional noise
until you arrive at the silence of yourself
and listen to it.

He looked ninety years old for thirty years and then he got the notion that he would die, and did so.

Somebody should have taken him to a stationary store and pointed out the difference between an envelope and a whore.

For fear you will be alone you do so many things that aren't you at all.

I don't know these people and they aren't my flowers.

There wasn't a single thing in there that reminded me of my existence.

I read the note and it did not please me and I threw it away, so not even time could find it.

Messy, isn't it?

There are seductions that should be in the Smithsonian Institute, right next to The Spirit of St. Louis.

In Watermelon Sugar deeds were done

We were all silent except for blink, blink, blink, blink, blink.

We walked back to iDEATH, holding hands. Hands are very nice things, especially after they have travelled back from making love.

I drank coffee and read old books and waited for the year to end.