Richard Brautigan Quotes

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

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

We call everything a river here. We are that kind of people.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

…those doughnuts are a lot better than having a mule kick you in the head,"

There was no argument there.

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

You sons-of-bitches all have bicycles!" he said, "I'll have a bicycle someday!

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.

It's good you're happy," she said. She said the word happy as if she were looking at it from a great distance through a telescope.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

I sat down and looked the bus over to see who was there, and it took me about a minute to realize that there was something very wrong with that bus, and it took the other people about the same period to realize that there was something very wrong with the bus, and the thing that was wrong was me.

I will be very careful the next time I fall in love, she told herself. Also, she had made a promise to herself that she intended on keeping. She was never going to go out with another writer: no matter how charming, sensitive, inventive or fun they could be. They weren't worth it in the long run. They were emotionally too expensive and the upkeep was complicated. They were like having a vacuum cleaner around the house that broke all the time and only Einstein could fix it. She wanted her next lover to be a broom.

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

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

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

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.

Hello, sir. Yes ... Uh-huh ... Yes ... You say that you want to bury your aunt with a Christmas tree in her coffin? Uh-huh ... She wanted it that way ... I'll see what I can do for you, sir. Oh, you have the measurements of the coffin with you? Very good ... We have our coffin-sized Christmas trees right over here, sir.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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."

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

It's all right," she said. "It's all right." That was really a very nice sound. There should be a bird that does that: that sings when you are impotent.

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

The cat's purring was the motor that ran the Japanese woman's dreaming.

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

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.

Money is sad shit

Lee Mellon told me that he was born in Meridian, Mississippi, and grew up in Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina, 'Near Asheville,' he said. 'That's Thomas Wolfe country.'

'Yeah,' I said.

Lee Mellon didn't have any Southern accent. 'You don't have much of a Southern accent,' I said.

'That's right, Jesse. I read a lot of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Kant when I was a kid,' Lee Mellon said.

I guess in some strange way that was supposed to get rid of a Southern accent. Lee Mellon thought so, anyway. I couldn't argue because I had never tried a Southern accent against the German philosophers.

Our names were made for us in another century.

She had a beautiful laugh which was like rain water pouring over daffodils made from silver.

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)

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

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.

I had become so quiet and so small in the grass by the pond that I was barely noticeable, hardly there. I sat there watching their living room shining out of the dark beside the pond. It looked like a fairy-tale functioning happily in the post-World War II gothic of America before television crippled the imagination and turned people indoors and away from living out their own fantasies with dignity. Anyway, I just kept getting smaller and smaller beside the pond, more and more unnoticed in the darkening summer grass until I disappeared into the 32 years that have passed since then.

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

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

Messy, isn't it?

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

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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

I hated to interrupt her. I know how much a dream can be worth, but, alas... "Hello.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In Watermelon Sugar deeds were done

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

Wood

We age in darkness like wood
and watch our phantoms change
their clothes
of shingles and boards
for a purpose that can only be
described as wood.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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 ...

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.

Gee, You're so Beautiful That It's Starting to Rain
Oh, Marcia,
I want your long blonde beauty
to be taught in high school,
so kids will learn that God
lives like music in the skin
and sounds like a sunshine harpsicord.
I want high school report cards
to look like this:
Playing with Gentle Glass Things
A
Computer Magic
A
Writing Letters to Those You Love
A
Finding out about Fish
A
Marcia's Long Blonde Beauty
A+!

Like some kind of strange vacuum cleaner I tried to console him. I recited the same old litanies that you say to people when you try to help their broken hearts, but words can't help at all.
It's just the sound of another human voice that makes the only difference. There's nothing you're ever going to say that's going to make anybody happy when they're feeling shitty about losing somebody that they love.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

He was so fascinated by the long single strand of black hair that he did not overflow his mind with fantasies about it, turning it into a hundred varieties of his imagination.
He just sat there staring at it.
Japanese hair.

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.

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.

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

Everyone has a place in history. Mine is clouds.

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

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

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.

She opened her purse which was like a small autumn field and near the fallen branches of an old apple tree, she found her keys.

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

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