Quotes from 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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

No Trespassing. 4/17 of a Haiku.

In Watermelon Sugar deeds were done

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

The Wait It seemed like years before I picked a bouquet of kisses off her mouth and put them into a dawn-colored vase in my heart. But the wait was worth it. Because I was in love.

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.

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

Her hair dreamt about being very carefully combed in the morning.

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.

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 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.

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

I always wanted to write a book that ended with the word Mayonnaise.

I had become so quiet and so small in the grass by the pond that I was barely noticeable, hardly there… 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…