Quotes from Richard Brautigan

those doughnuts are a lot better than having a mule kick you in the head, There was no argument there.

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

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.

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

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)

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)

The sun was like a huge fifty-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.

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.

It only made sense that drinking intelligent blood would make intelligent fleas.

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

I think my mind is going. It is changing into a cranial junkyard. I have a huge pile of rusty tin cans the size of Mount Everest and about a million old cars that are going nowhere but between my ears.

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.

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

to remove a book from the period of its birth is like lifting a stone from a stream and watching it lose its luster in the palm of your hand.

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.

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

One day he decided that his liking for poetry could not be fully expressed in just reading poetry or listening to poets reading on phonograph records. He decided to take the plumbing out of his house and completely replace it with poetry, and so he did.

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.

He died on his return to New York. He died on the gangplank, just a few feet away from America. He didn't quite make it. His hat did though. It rolled off his head and down the gang-plank and landed, plop, on America. Poor devil. I heard it was his heart, but the way the Chinese dentist described the business, it could have been his teeth.

There was no logical reason why he did not have eggs in the house. It was just that he felt slightly uncomfortable when they were there. Also, he did not like to buy eggs. Something about the cartons put him off and he did not like the fact that they came in dozens.

He'd had enough suffering right now to last him forever with plenty left over for others if they didn't have enough and wanted to have some more.

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.

Suskunluk kabiliyeti, baz? ÅŸeyleri kesebilirken baz? ÅŸeyleri kesemeyen bir b?çak gibi belirsiz bir keskinlikle birleÅŸiyor. Bir ÅŸeftaliyi kesebilir ama bir elmay? kesemez.