Richard Brautigan Quotes

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

A sombrero fell out of the sky and landed on the main street of town in front of the mayor, his cousin, and a person out of work. The day was scrubbed clean by the desert air. The sky was blue. It was the blue of human eyes, waiting for something to happen. There was no reason for a sombrero to fall out of the sky. No airplane or helicopter was passing overhead and it was not a religious holiday.

My teachers could easily have ridden with Jesse James for all the time they stole from me.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Your Catfish Friend If I were to live my life in catfish forms in scaffolds of skin and whiskers at the bottom of a pond and you were to come by one evening when the moon was shining down into my dark home and stand there at the edge of my affection and think, “It's beautiful here by this pond. I wish somebody loved me,” I'd love you and be your catfish friend and drive such lonely thoughts from your mind and suddenly you would be at peace, and ask yourself, “I wonder if there are any catfish in this pond? It seems like a perfect place for them.

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.

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

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.

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 of America 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.

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

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.

"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."

Our names were made for us in another century.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

One day Time will die And love will bury 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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