Trout Fishing In America Brautigan Quotes

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

Excuse me, I said. I thought you were a trout stream. I'm not, she said.

the sweet juices of your mouth are like castles bathed in honey. i've never had it done so gently before. you have put a circle of castles around my penis and you swirl them like sunlight on the wings of birds.

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

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

I feel horrible. She doesn't love me and I wander around the house like a sewing machine that's just finished sewing a turd to a garbage can lid.

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

The bookstore was a parking lot for used graveyards. Thousands of graveyards were parked in rows like cars. Most of the books were out of print, and no one wanted to read them any more and the people who had read the books had died or forgotten about them, but through the organic process of music the books had become virgins again.

USED TROUT STREAM FOR SALE. MUST BE SEEN TO BE APPRECIATED.

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.

You're not fooling anyone by taking your clothes off when you go to bed.

No Trespassing. 4/17 of a Haiku.

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

I always wanted to write a book that ended with the word Mayonnaise.

We were all silent except for blink, blink, blink, blink, blink.

The old drunk told me about trout fishing. When he could talk, he had a way of describing trout as if they were a precious and intelligent metal.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Truth is stranger than fishin

The sun was like a huge fifty-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.

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

to remove a book from the period of its birth is like lifting a stone from a stream and watching it lose its luster in the palm of your hand.

Thousands of graveyards were parked in rows like cars.

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.

he was leaving for America, often only a place in the mind.

I walked home past the glass whiskers of the houses, reflecting the downward rushing waterfalls of night.

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

I remember mistaking an old woman for a trout stream in Vermont, and I had to beg her pardon. Excuse me, I said, I thought you were trout stream. I’m not, she said.

The fish was a twelve-inch rainbow trout with a huge hump on its back. A hunchback trout.

His eyes were like the shoelaces of a harpsichord.

You had to be a plumber to fish that creek.

Then they decided that the fleas that lived on Siamese cats would probably be more intelligent than the fleas that lived on just ordinary alley cats. It only made sense that drinking intelligent blood would make intelligent fleas.

Once, while cleaning the trout before I went home in the almost night, I had a vision of going over to the poor graveyard and gathering up grass and fruit jars and tin cans and markers and wilted flowers and bugs and weeds and clods and going home and putting a hook in the vise and tying a fly with all that stuff and then going outside and casting it up into the sky, watching it float over clouds and then into the evening star. (from Trout Fishing on the Bevel, page 21)

Everything smelled of sheep. The dandelions were suddenly more sheep than flower, each petal reflecting wool and the sound of a bell ringing off the yellow. But the thing that smelled the most like sheep, was the very sun itself. When the sun went behind a cloud, the smell of the sheep decreased, like standing on some old guy's hearing aid, and when the sun came back again, the smell of the sheep was loud, like a clap of thunder inside a coffee cup. (from "On Paradise", page 50)

What we eat is funny and what we drink is even more hilarious: turkeys, Gallo port, hot dogs, watermelons, Popeyes, salmon croquettes, frappes, Christian Brothers port, orange rye bread, canteloupes, Popeyes, salads, cheese--booze, grub and Popeyes.

Hello, sir. Yes...Uh-huh...Yes...You say that you want to bury your aunt with a Christmas tree in her coffin? Uh-huh...She wanted it that way...I'll see what I can do for you, sir. Oh, you have the measurements of the coffin with you? Very good...We have our coffin-sized Christmas trees right over here, sir.

The man who owned the bookstore was, of course, a Jew, a retired merchant seamen who had been torpedoed in the north Atlantic and floated there day after day until death did not want him. He had a young wife, a heart attack, a Volkswagen, and a home. He learned about life at 16, first from Dostoyevsky and then from the whores of New Orleans.

I like to think (and the sooner the better!) of a cybernetic meadow where mammels and computers live together in mutually programming harmony like pure water touching clear sky. I like to think (right now, please!) of a cybernetic forest filled with pines and electronics where deer stroll peacefully past computers as if they were flowers with spinning blossoms. I like to think (it has to be!) of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by machines of loving grace.

A little ways up from the shack was an outhouse with its door flung violently open. The inside of the outhouse was exposed like a human face and the outhouse seemed to say, "The old guy who built me crapped in here 9,745 times and he's dead now and I don't want anyone else to touch me. He was a good guy. He built me with loving care. Leave me alone. I'm a monument now to a good ass gone under. There's no mystery here. That's why the door's open. If you have to crap, go in the bushes like the deer." "Fuck you," I said to the outhouse. "All I want is a ride down the river.

Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America

It was a hot day and the Ferris wheel was turning in the air like a thermometer bent in a circle and given the grace of music.

There was a stove pipe on top of the box, but there were no bullet holes in the pipe. I was amazed. Almost all the camp stoves we had seen in Idaho had been full of bullet holes. I guess it’s only reasonable that people, when they get the chance, would want to shoot some old stove sitting in the woods.” Excerpt From Trout Fishing in America

I saw Trout Fishing in America Shorty passed out in the front window of a Filipino laundromat. He was sitting in his wheelchair with closed eyes staring out the window. There was a tranquil expression on his face. He almost looked human. He had probably fallen asleep while he was having his brains washed in one of the machines. (from "The Shipping of Trout Fishing in America Shorty to Nelson Algren", page 47)