Brautigan Quotes & Sayings

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

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

The bookstore was a parking lot for used graveyards. Thousands of graveyards were parked in rows like cars. Most of the books were out of print, and no one wanted to read them any more and the people who had read the books had died or forgotten about them, but through the organic process of music the books had become virgins again. — Richard Brautigan

Good luck, good will, good fortune, not ill. — Stephen King

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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

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

Yukiko rolled over.
That plain, that simple.
Her body was small in its moving.
And her hair followed, dreaming her as she moved.
A cat, her cat, in bed with her was awakened by her moving, and watched her turn slowly over in bed. When she stopped moving, the cat went back to sleep.
It was a black cat and could have been a suburb of her hair. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Watermelon Sugar deeds were done — 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

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

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

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

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

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

Alas, Measured Perfectly"

Saturday, August 25, 1888. 5:20 P.M.
is the name of a photograph of two
old women in a front yard, beside
a white house. One of the women is
sitting in a chair with a dog in her
lap. The other woman is looking at
some flowers. Perhaps the women are
happy, but then it is Saturday, August
25, 1888. 5:21 P.M., and all over. — Richard Brautigan

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

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

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

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

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

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

Money is sad shit — Richard Brautigan

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

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

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

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

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

Her sunny side was always up. — Richard Brautigan

Messy, isn't it? — 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

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

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

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

30 cents, two transfers, love
Thinking hard about you
I got on the bus
and paid 30 cents car fare
and asked the driver for two transfers
before discovering
that I was
alone. — Richard Brautigan

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Return of the Rivers

All the rivers run into the sea;
yet the sea is not full;
unto the place from whence the rivers come,
thither they return again.

It is raining today
in the mountains.

It is a warm green rain
with love
in its pockets
for spring is here,
and does not dream
of death.

Birds happen music
like clocks ticking heaves
in a land
where children love spiders,
and let them sleep
in their hair.

A slow rain sizzles
on the river
like a pan
full of frying flowers,
and with each drop
of rain
the ocean
begins again. — 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

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

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

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

Thousands of graveyards were parked in rows like cars. — 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

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

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

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

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

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