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Quotes of the Day for 30 January 2005 - Richard Brautigan

Richard Brautigan was born at Tacoma, Washington on this day in 1935. Some sources say that his father left before Richard was a year old and his mother was poor, but no other details seem to be known about his youth in the "City of Destiny". He showed up in San Francisco between 1955 and 1958, and though he never was one of the Beat Poets he was known to them. He became more widely known with the publication of "Trout Fishing in America", a book I enjoyed although it doesn't have a lot to say about trout. His life oscillated between a free ability to pick up and join in with others, on the road or about town, followed by long spells of isolation. In fact, the date of his death is unknown as he committed suicide four or five weeks before his body was found. For someone who seemed to fit his time so uneasily, it seems eerily appropriate that he was the poet-in-residence of the California Institute of Technology for a year.

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.

The act of dying is like hitch-hiking into a strange town late at night where it is cold and raining, and you are alone again.

The time is right to mix sentences with dirt and the sun with punctuation and the rain with verbs, and for worms to pass through question marks, and the stars to shine down on budding nouns, and the dew to form on paragraphs.

The only hope we have is our children and the seeds we give them and the gardens we plant together.

Romeo and Juliet
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.

Expressing a human need, I've always wanted to write a book that ended with the word Mayonnaise.
     - All from Richard Brautigan, 1935 - 1984

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