Richard Brautigan Quotes & Sayings

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

Congratulations," I said. "It's so wonderful to write a book." "I walked all the way here," she said. "I started at midnight. I would have gotten here sooner if I weren't so old." "Where do you live?" I said. "The Kit Carson Hotel," she said. "And I've written a book." Then she handed it proudly to me as if it were the most precious thing in the world. And it was. It was a loose-leaf notebook of the type that you find everywhere in America. There is no place that does not have them. There was a heavy label pasted on the cover and written in broad green crayon across the label was the title: GROWING FLOWERS BY CANDLELIGHT IN HOTEL ROOMS BY MRS. CHARLES FINE ADAMS — Richard Brautigan

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

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

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

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

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

The 1960s:
A lot of people remember hating President Lyndon Baines Johnson and loving Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison, depending on the point of view. God rest their souls. — Richard Brautigan

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

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

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

New furniture has no character whereas old furniture always has a past. New furniture is always mute, but old furniture can almost talk. You can almost hear it talking about the good times and troubles it's seen. I think there is a Country and Western song about talking furniture, but I can't remember the name. — Richard Brautigan

God-forsaken is beautiful, too. — Richard Brautigan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Once upon a valley
There came down
From some goldenblue mountains
A handsome young prince
Who was riding a dawncolored horse
Names Lordsburg.

I love you
You're my breathing castle
Gentle so gentle
We'll live forever

In the valley
There was a beautiful maiden
Whom the prince drifted into love with
Like a New Mexico made from apple thunder and long
glass beds.

I love you
You're my breathing castle
Gentle so gentle
We'll live forever

The prince enchanted
The maiden
And they rode off
On the dawncolored horse
Named Lordsburg
Toward the goldenblue mountains.

I love you
You're my breathing castle
Gentle so gentle
We'll live forever

They would have lived
happily ever after
if the horse hadn't had
a flat tire
In front of a dragon's
House. — Richard Brautigan

"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

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

Put the coffee on, bubbles, I'm coming home — Richard Brautigan

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

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

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

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

It's an old song that's been played on all the jukeboxes in America. The song has been around so long that it's been recorded on the very dust of America and it has settled on everything and changed chairs and cars and toys and lamps and windows into billions of phonographs to play that song back into the ear of our broken heart. — Richard Brautigan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our names were made for us in another century. — Richard Brautigan

The truck looked just like a Civil War truck if they'd had trucks back in those times. But the truck ran, even though it didn't have a gas tank.
There was an empty fifty-gallon gasoline drum on the bed of the truck with a smaller gasoline can on top of it, and there was a syphon leading from that can to the fuel line.
It worked like this. Lee Mellon drove and I stayed on the back of the truck and made sure everything went all right with the syphon, that it didn't get knocked out of kilter by the motion of the truck.
We looked kind of funny going down the highway. I'd never had the heart to ask Lee Mellon what happened to the gas tank. I figured it was best not to know. — Richard Brautigan

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

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

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

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

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

Vida was sound asleep when I went back to my room. I turned on the light and it woke her up. She was blinking and her face had that soft marble quality to it that beautiful women have when they are suddenly awakened and are not quite ready for it yet. "What's happening?" she said. "It's another book," she replied, answering her own question. "Yes," I said. "What's it about?" she said automatically like a gentle human phonograph. "It's about growing flowers in hotel rooms. — Richard Brautigan

The voyage from San Francisco to Hawaii had been the most terrifying experience Greer and Cameron had ever gone through, even more terrible than the time they shot a deputy sheriff in Idaho ten times and he wouldn't die and Greer finally
had to say to the deputy sheriff,
"Please die because we don't want to
shoot you again".
And the deputy sheriff had said, "Ok, I'll die, but don't shoot me again".
"We won't shoot you again", Cameron had said.
"Ok, I'm dead", and he was. — Richard Brautigan

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

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

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

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

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

Im haunted a little this evening by feelings that have no vocabulary and events that should be explained in dimensions of lint rather than words.
Ive been examining half-scraps of my childhood. They are pieces of distant life that have no form or meaning. They are things that just happened like lint. — Richard Brautigan

We're just like you,' the other tiger said. 'We speak the same language you do. We think the same thought. But we're tigers.'
'You could help me with arithmetic,' I said.
'What's that?' one of the tigers said.
'My arithmetic.'
'Oh, your arithmetic.'
'Yeah.'
'What do you want to know?' one of the tigers said.
'What's nine times nine?'
'Eighty-one,' a tiger said.
'What's eight times eight?'
'Fifty-six,' a tiger said.
I asked them half of dozen other questions: six times six, seven times four, etc. I was having a lot of trouble with arithmetic. Finally the tigers got bored with my questions and told me to go away.
'OK,' I said. 'I'll go outside.'
'Don't go too far,' one of the tigers said. 'We don't want anyone to come up here and kill us.'
'OK.'
They both went back to eating my parents. I went outside and sat down by the river. 'I'm an orphan,' I said. — Richard Brautigan

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

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

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

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

Karma Repair Kit Items 1-4. 1.Get enough food to eat, and eat it. 2.Find a place to sleep where it is quiet, and sleep there. 3.Reduce intellectual and emotional noise until you arrive at the silence of yourself, and listen to it. 4. — Richard Brautigan

Once, while cleaning the trout before I went home in the almost night, I had a vision of going over to the poor graveyard and gathering up grass and fruit jars and tin cans and markers and wilted flowers and bugs and weeds and clods and going home and putting a hook in the vise and tying a fly with all that stuff and then going outside and casting it up into the sky, watching it float over clouds and then into the evening star.
(from Trout Fishing on the Bevel, page 21) — Richard Brautigan

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

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

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

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

We were all silent except for blink, blink, blink, blink, blink. — Richard Brautigan

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

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

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

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

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

We stepped outside rather hurriedly and down the street to anonymous sanctuary among the buildings of San Francisco.
"Promise me till your dying day, you'll believe that a Mellon was a Confederate general. It's the truth. That God-damn book lies! There was a Confederate general in my family!"
"I promise," I said and it was a promise that was kept. — Richard Brautigan

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

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

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

There is darkness on your lantern
and pumpkins in your wind.
and Oh, they clutter up your mind
with their senseless bumping
while your heart is like a sea gull
frozen into a long distance telephone
call.
I'd like to take the darkness
off your lantern and change the pumpkins
into sky fields of ordered comets
and disconnect the refrigerator telephone
that frightens your heart into standing
still. — Richard Brautigan

Her sunny side was always up. — Richard Brautigan

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

I guess the last remaining question is: What about the sombrero? It's still there, lying in the street but its temperature had returned to -24 degrees and fortunately for America it stayed there. Millions of tourists have walked all around it but not one of them has seen it, though it is in plain sight. How can you miss a very cold white sombrero lying in the Main Street of a town? In other words: There is more to life than meets the eye. — Richard Brautigan

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

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

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

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

The American humorist sat on his couch suffering thoughts of her, trying to figure out how to win back her affections, wondering what had happened between them or just tumbling head-over-heels down into romantic oblivion where the image of a remembered kiss provokes bottomless despair and makes death seem like the right idea.
He experienced the basics of love ended. — Richard Brautigan

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

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

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

Money is sad shit — Richard Brautigan

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

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

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

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

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

Everything smelled of sheep. The dandelions were suddenly more sheep than flower, each petal reflecting wool and the sound of a bell ringing off the yellow. But the thing that smelled the most like sheep, was the very sun itself. When the sun went behind a cloud, the smell of the sheep decreased, like standing on some old guy's hearing aid, and when the sun came back again, the smell of the sheep was loud, like a clap of thunder inside a coffee cup.

(from "On Paradise", page 50) — Richard Brautigan

One day
Time will die
And love will bury it — Richard Brautigan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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