Top 90 Richard Brautigan Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I fished upstream coming ever closer and closer to the narrow staircase of the canyon. Then I went up into it as if I were entering a department store. I caught three trout in the lost and found department.”

— Richard Brautigan

52. “For the rest of my life I’ll be thinking about that hamburger. I’ll be sitting there at the counter, holding it in my hands with tears streaming down my cheeks. The waitress will be looking away because she doesn’t like to see kids crying when they are eating hamburgers...”

— Richard Brautigan

53. “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.”

— Richard Brautigan

54. “One spring afternoon as a child in the strange town of Portland, I walked down to a different street corner, and saw a row of old houses, huddled together like seals on a rock.”

— Richard Brautigan

55. “Let us pretend that my mind is a taxi... and suddenly you are riding in it.”

— Richard Brautigan

56. “Her hand had a lot of strength gained through the process of gentleness.”

— Richard Brautigan

57. “We call everything a river here. We are that kind of people.”

— Richard Brautigan

58. “I do not care to be esthetically tickled in a fancy theater surrounded by an audience drenched in the confident perfume of culture. I can’t afford it.”

— Richard Brautigan

59. “I’m in a constant process of thinking about things.”

— Richard Brautigan

60. “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.”

— Richard Brautigan

61. “Our names were made for us in another century.”

— Richard Brautigan

62. “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.”

— Richard Brautigan

63. “New furniture has no character whereas old furniture always has a past. New furniture is always mute, but old furniture can almost talk. You can almost hear it talking about the good times and troubles it’s seen. I think there is a Country and Western song about talking furniture, but I can’t remember the name.”

— Richard Brautigan

64. “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.”

— Richard Brautigan

65. “Watcha doin? If you’re like me, you’re doin nothin, but you’re doin it so well that everybody thinks you’re doin somethin.”

— Richard Brautigan

66. “Now it was close to sunset and the earth was beginning to cool off in the manner of eternity and office girls were returning like penguins from Montgomery Street.”

— Richard Brautigan

67. “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.”

— Richard Brautigan

68. “My sperm came out into the water, unaccustomed to the light, and instantly it became a misty, stringy kind of thing and swirled out like a falling star, and I saw a dead fish come forward and float into my sperm, bending it in the middle.”

— Richard Brautigan

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

— Richard Brautigan

70. “It’s pretty hard to have faith when everybody is trying to lock you up.”

— Richard Brautigan

71. “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.”

— Richard Brautigan

72. “I read the note and it did not please me and I threw it away, so not even time could find it.”

— Richard Brautigan

73. “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.”

— Richard Brautigan

74. “We were all silent except for blink, blink, blink, blink, blink.”

— Richard Brautigan

75. “You sons-of-bitches all have bicycles!” he said, “I’ll have a bicycle someday!”

— Richard Brautigan

76. “I think that I would find automobiles a little more interesting if they carried their own parking space with them.”

— Richard Brautigan

77. “The cat’s purring was the motor that ran the Japanese woman’s dreaming.”

— Richard Brautigan

78. “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.”

— Richard Brautigan

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

— Richard Brautigan

80. “The Forgotten Works just go on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on. You get the picture. It’s a big place, much bigger than we are.”

— Richard Brautigan

81. “Don’t worry about him, the girl said. He’s rich. He has 3,859 Rolls Royces.”

— Richard Brautigan

82. “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.”

— Richard Brautigan

83. “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.”

— Richard Brautigan

84. “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.”

— Richard Brautigan

85. “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.”

— Richard Brautigan

86. “He looked ninety years old for thirty years and then he got the notion that he would die, and did so.”

— Richard Brautigan

87. “I’ll think about things for thirty or forty years before I’ll write it.”

— Richard Brautigan

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

— Richard Brautigan

89. “It’s all right,” she said. “It’s all right.” That was really a very nice sound. There should be a bird that does that: that sings when you are impotent.”

— Richard Brautigan

90. “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.”

— Richard Brautigan

91. “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.”

— Richard Brautigan

92. “Her voice, delicate as it was, had the strength to it that made one realize why a teacup can stay in one piece for centuries, defying the changes of history and the turmoil of man.”

— Richard Brautigan

93. “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.”

— Richard Brautigan