“He created his own Kool Aid reality and was able to illuminate himself by it.”
Source: Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America, The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, and In Watermelon Sugar
“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.”
Source: Revenge of the Lawn, The Abortion, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away
“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.”
“We looked like a parade barely moving toward YOU MIGHT GET LOST.”
Source: Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America, The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, and In Watermelon Sugar
“because you always have a clock strapped to your body, it's natural that i should think of you as the correct time: with your long blonde hair at 8:03, and your pulse-lightning breasts at 11:17, and your rose-meow smile at 5:30, i know i'm right.”
Source: Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America, The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, and In Watermelon Sugar
“This morning I saw a coyote walking through the sagebrush right at the very edge of the ocean ― next stop China. The coyote was acting like he was in New Mexico or Wyoming, except that there were whales passing below. That’s what this country does for you. Come down to Big Sur and let your soul have some room to get outside its marrow.”
Source: Richard Brautigan's A Confederate General from Big Sur, Dreaming of Babylon, and The Hawkline Monster: Three Books in the Manner of Their Original Editions
“I'll tell you about it because I am here and you are distant.”
Source: Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America, The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, and In Watermelon Sugar
“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”
Source: Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America, The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, and In Watermelon Sugar
“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”
Source: Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America ; The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster ; And, In Watermelon Sugar
“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.”
Source: Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America, The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, and In Watermelon Sugar
“The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster When you take your pill it's like a mine disaster. I think of all the people lost inside you.”
Source: Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America, The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, and In Watermelon Sugar
“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+!”
Source: Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America, The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, and In Watermelon Sugar
“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.”
Source: Sombrero Fallout
“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.”
Source: Richard Brautigan's A Confederate General from Big Sur, Dreaming of Babylon, and The Hawkline Monster: Three Books in the Manner of Their Original Editions
“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.”
Source: Richard Brautigan's A Confederate General from Big Sur, Dreaming of Babylon, and The Hawkline Monster: Three Books in the Manner of Their Original Editions
“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.”
“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 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.”
Source: Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America, The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, and In Watermelon Sugar
“Love Poem ـــــــــ 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.”
Source: Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America, The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, and In Watermelon Sugar
“Hinged to forgetfulness like a door, she slowly closed out of sight, and she was the woman I loved, but too many times she slept like a mechanical deer in my caresses, and I ached in the metal silence of her dreams.”
“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.”
Source: Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America ; The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster ; And, In Watermelon Sugar
“Her sunny side was always up.”
Source: Sombrero Fallout: A Japanese Novel
“The bees in my stomach are dead and getting used to it.”
Source: Richard Brautigan's A Confederate General from Big Sur, Dreaming of Babylon, and The Hawkline Monster: Three Books in the Manner of Their Original Editions
“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.”
“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.”
Source: Revenge of the Lawn, The Abortion, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away
“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.”
“We walked back to iDEATH, holding hands. Hands are very nice things, especially after they have travelled back from making love.”
Source: Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America, The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, and In Watermelon Sugar
“Our names were made for us in another century.”
Source: A Confederate General From Big Sur
“God-forsaken is beautiful, too.”
“He learned about life at sixteen, first from Dostoevsky and then from the whores of New Orleans.”
Source: Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America ; The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster ; And, In Watermelon Sugar
“Burn all the maps to your body. I'm not here of my own choosing.”
Source: Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America ; The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster ; And, In Watermelon Sugar
“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.”
Source: Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America, The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, and In Watermelon Sugar
“I’ll affect you slowly as if you were having a picnic in a dream. There will be no ants. It won’t rain.”
“I don't know these people and they aren't my flowers.”
Source: Revenge of the Lawn, The Abortion, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away
“You've got some 'Star-Spangled' nails in your coffin, kid. That's what they've done for you, son.”
Source: Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America ; The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster ; And, In Watermelon Sugar
“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.”
Source: Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America, The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, and In Watermelon Sugar
“One day Time will die And love will bury it”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“...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.”
“There are not too many fables about man's misuse of sunflower seeds.”
“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 drank coffee and read old books and waited for the year to end.”
Source: Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America, The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, and In Watermelon Sugar
“My teachers could easily have ridden with Jesse James for all the time they stole from me.”
“I don't want my daughter to be educated. I think women should just be decorative.”
“The heart is something else. Nobody knows what's going to happen,' I said”
Source: Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America ; The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster ; And, In Watermelon Sugar
“I wonder
if there are any catfish
in this pond? It seems like
a perfect place for them.”
Source: Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America, The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, and In Watermelon Sugar
