Richard Brautigan
All of us have a place in history. Mine is clouds.Collection: History
I didn't know the full dimensions of forever, but I knew it was longer than waiting for Christmas to come.Collection: Christmas
It's strange how the simple things in life go on while we become more difficult.
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 don't want my daughter to be educated. I think women should just be decorative.
I'll think about things for thirty or forty years before I'll write it.
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.Collection: Karma
Sometimes life is merely a matter of coffee and whatever intimacy a cup of coffee affords.Collection: Coffee
The time is right to mix sentences with dirt and the sun with punctuation and rain with verbs.Collection: Rain
Finding is losing something else. I think about, perhaps even mourn, what I lost to find thisCollection: Thinking
One day Time will die And love will bury itCollection: One Day
I drank coffee and read old books and waited for the year to end.Collection: Coffee
I have always wanted to write a book that ended with the word 'mayonnaise.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Tired
I’ll affect you slowly as if you were having a picnic in a dream. There will be no ants. It won’t rain.Collection: Dream
My teachers could easily have ridden with Jesse James for all the time they stole from me.Collection: Teacher
Excuse me, I said. I thought you were a trout stream. I'm not, she said.Collection: Trout
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.Collection: Heart
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.Collection: Dog
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.Collection: Wind
Her sunny side was always up.Collection: Sides
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.Collection: Religious
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.Collection: Horse
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.Collection: Technology
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.Collection: Vocabulary
God-forsaken is beautiful, too.Collection: Beautiful
In Watermelon Sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar.Collection: Life
He learned about life at sixteen, first from Dostoevsky and then from the whores of New Orleans.Collection: New Orleans
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.Collection: Men
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.Collection: House
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.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Love
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.Collection: Hate
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.Collection: Space
It's pretty hard to have faith when everybody is trying to lock you up.Collection: Trying
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 hardCollection: Thinking
I believe I saw a woodcock. He had a long bill like putting a fire hydrant into a pencil sharpener, then pasting it onto a bird and letting the bird fly away in front of me with this thing on its face for no other purpose than to amaze me.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Fall
...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.Collection: Heart
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+!Collection: Beautiful
He created his own Kool Aid reality and was able to illuminate himself by it.Collection: Reality
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.Collection: Thinking
We walked back to iDEATH, holding hands. Hands are very nice things, especially after they have travelled back from making love.Collection: Nice
"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."Collection: Numbers
There are not too many fables about man's misuse of sunflower seeds.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Children