Richard Brautigan

“It's an old song that's been played on all the jukeboxes in America. The song has been around so long that it's been recorded on the very dust of America and it has settled on everything and changed chairs and cars and toys and lamps and windows into billions of phonographs to play that song back into the ear of our broken heart.”

“I’m haunted by all the space that I will live without you.”

“One dayTime will dieAnd love will bury it”

“Just because people love your mind, doesn't mean they have to have your body, too”

“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.”

“Alas, Measured Perfectly"Saturday, August 25, 1888. 5:20 P.M.is the name of a photograph of twoold women in a front yard, besidea white house. One of the women issitting in a chair with a dog in herlap. The other woman is looking atsome flowers. Perhaps the women arehappy, but then it is Saturday, August25, 1888. 5:21 P.M., and all over.”

“You've gotsome 'Star-Spangled' nailsin your coffin, kid.That's whatthey've done for you, son.”

“While discussing the monster:"It sounds like the combination of water being poured into a glass," Miss Hawkline said, "A dog barking and the muttering of a drunk parrot. And very, very loud.""I think we're going to need the shotgun for this one," Cameron said.”

“Yukiko rolled over.That plain, that simple.Her body was small in its moving.And her hair followed, dreaming her as she moved.A cat, her cat, in bed with her was awakened by her moving, and watched her turn slowly over in bed. When she stopped moving, the cat went back to sleep.It was a black cat and could have been a suburb of her hair.”

“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.”

“It's strange how the simple things in life go on while we become difficult.”

“Messy, isn't it?”

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

“Vida was sound asleep when I went back to my room. I turned on the light and it woke her up. She was blinking and her face had that soft marble quality to it that beautiful women have when they are suddenly awakened and are not quite ready for it yet. "What's happening?" she said. "It's another book," she replied, answering her own question. "Yes," I said. "What's it about?" she said automatically like a gentle human phonograph. "It's about growing flowers in hotel rooms.”

“Congratulations," I said. "It's so wonderful to write a book." "I walked all the way here," she said. "I started at midnight. I would have gotten here sooner if I weren't so old." "Where do you live?" I said. "The Kit Carson Hotel," she said. "And I've written a book." Then she handed it proudly to me as if it were the most precious thing in the world. And it was. It was a loose-leaf notebook of the type that you find everywhere in America. There is no place that does not have them. There was a heavy label pasted on the cover and written in broad green crayon across the label was the title: GROWING FLOWERS BY CANDLELIGHT IN HOTEL ROOMS BY MRS. CHARLES FINE ADAMS”

“The voyage from San Francisco to Hawaii had been the most terrifying experience Greer and Cameron had ever gone through, even more terrible than the time they shot a deputy sheriff in Idaho ten times and he wouldn't die and Greer finallyhad to say to the deputy sheriff,"Please die because we don't want toshoot you again". And the deputy sheriff had said, "Ok, I'll die, but don't shoot me again"."We won't shoot you again", Cameron had said."Ok, I'm dead", and he was.”

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

“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.”

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

“...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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Someday Time will die, and Love will bury it”

“He looked as if he'd got a lot of pleasure out of going ten rounds with your grandmother and making sure she went the whole distance.”

“She wore a loose bathrobe that covered up a body that would have won first prize in a beauty contest for cement blocks.....She had a voice that made pearl harbour sound like a lullaby.”

“Somebody should have taken him to a stationary store and pointed out the difference between an envelope and a whore.”

“The only thing he likes better than a nice juicy homicide is a sirloin steak smothered with onions.”

“It was not an outhouse resting upon the imagination. It was reality.”

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

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

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

“Her sunny side was always up.”

“With the rain fallingsurgically against the roof,I ate a dish of ice creamthat looked like Kafka's hat.It was a dish of ice creamtasting like an operating tablewith the patient staringup at the ceiling.”

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

“A BoatO beautifulwas the werewolfin his evil forest.We took himto the carnivaland he startedcryingwhen he sawthe Ferris wheel.Electricgreen and red tearsflowed downhis furry cheeks.He lookedlike a boatout on the darkwater.”

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

“He learned about life at sixteen, first from Dostoevsky and then from the whores of New Orleans.”

“The Beautiful Poem"I go to bed in Los Angeles thinking about you.Pissing a few moments ago I looked down at my penisaffectionately.Knowing it has been inside you twice today makes mefeel beautiful.”

“Boo, ForeverSpinning like a ghoston the bottom of a top,I'm haunted by allthe space that Iwill live withoutyou.”

“I feel horrible. She doesn'tlove me and I wander aroundthe house like a sewing machine that's just finished sewing a turd to a garbage can lid.”

“I like to think (it has to be!)of a cybernetic ecologywhere we are free of our laborsand joined back to nature,returned to our mammalbrothers and sisters,and all watched overby machines of loving grace.”

“There was a fine thing about that trout. I only wish I could have made a death mask of him. Not of his body though, but of his energy. I don't know if anyone would have understood his body. I put it in my creel.”

“Thousands of graveyards were parked in rows like cars.”

“If you will die for me,I will die for youand our graves will be like two lovers washingtheir clothes togetherin a laundromatIf you will bring the soapI will bring the bleach.”

“God-forsaken is beautiful, too.”

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

“The truck looked just like a Civil War truck if they'd had trucks back in those times. But the truck ran, even though it didn't have a gas tank.There was an empty fifty-gallon gasoline drum on the bed of the truck with a smaller gasoline can on top of it, and there was a syphon leading from that can to the fuel line.It worked like this. Lee Mellon drove and I stayed on the back of the truck and made sure everything went all right with the syphon, that it didn't get knocked out of kilter by the motion of the truck.We looked kind of funny going down the highway. I'd never had the heart to ask Lee Mellon what happened to the gas tank. I figured it was best not to know.”