Top 90 Richard Brautigan Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Richard Brautigan

2. “One day Time will die And love will bury it.”

— Richard Brautigan

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

— Richard Brautigan

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

— Richard Brautigan

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

— Richard Brautigan

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

— Richard Brautigan

7. “I have always wanted to write a book that ended with the word ’mayonnaise.”

— Richard Brautigan

8. “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.”

— Richard Brautigan

9. “In Watermelon Sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar.”

— Richard Brautigan

10. “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.”

— Richard Brautigan

11. “Excuse me, I said. I thought you were a trout stream. I’m not, she said.”

— Richard Brautigan

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

— Richard Brautigan

13. “For fear you will be alone you do so many things that aren’t you at all.”

— Richard Brautigan

14. “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.”

— Richard Brautigan

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

— Richard Brautigan

16. “He created his own Kool Aid reality and was able to illuminate himself by it.”

— Richard Brautigan

17. “I don’t want my daughter to be educated. I think women should just be decorative.”

— Richard Brautigan

18. “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.”

— Richard Brautigan

19. “I’ll tell you about it because I am here and you are distant.”

— Richard Brautigan

20. “Everyone has a place in history. Mine is clouds.”

— Richard Brautigan

21. “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.”

— Richard Brautigan

22. “Hands are very nice things, especially after they have travelled back from making love.”

— Richard Brautigan

23. “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.”

— Richard Brautigan

24. “Her sunny side was always up.”

— Richard Brautigan

25. “The sun was like a huge 50-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.”

— Richard Brautigan

26. “I don’t know these people and they aren’t my flowers.”

— Richard Brautigan

27. “Burn all the maps to your body. I’m not here of my own choosing.”

— Richard Brautigan

28. “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.”

— Richard Brautigan

29. “You’ve got some ‘Star-Spangled’ nails in your coffin, kid. That’s what they’ve done for you, son.”

— Richard Brautigan

30. “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.”

— Richard Brautigan

31. “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.”

— Richard Brautigan

32. “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.”

— Richard Brautigan

33. “You’re not fooling anyone by taking your clothes off when you go to bed.”

— Richard Brautigan

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

— Richard Brautigan

35. “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.”

— Richard Brautigan

36. “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.”

— Richard Brautigan

37. “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.”

— Richard Brautigan

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

— Richard Brautigan

39. “She had a beautiful laugh which was like rain water pouring over daffodils made from silver.”

— Richard Brautigan

40. “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.”

— Richard Brautigan

41. “There are not too many fables about man’s misuse of sunflower seeds.”

— Richard Brautigan

42. “Language does not leave fossils, at least not until it has become written.”

— Richard Brautigan

43. “The bees in my stomach are dead and getting used to it.”

— Richard Brautigan

44. “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.”

— Richard Brautigan

45. “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?”

— Richard Brautigan

46. “God-forsaken is beautiful, too.”

— Richard Brautigan

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

— Richard Brautigan

48. “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.”

— Richard Brautigan

49. “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.”

— Richard Brautigan

50. “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.”

— Richard Brautigan