Quotes from Trout Fishing in America

Richard Brautigan ·  112 pages

Rating: (9.7K votes)


“I drank coffee and read old books and waited for the year to end.”
― Richard Brautigan, quote from Trout Fishing in America


“Excuse me, I said. I thought you were a trout stream.
I'm not, she said.”
― Richard Brautigan, quote from Trout Fishing in America


“He created his own Kool Aid reality and was able to illuminate himself by it.”
― Richard Brautigan, quote from Trout Fishing in America


“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.”
― Richard Brautigan, quote from Trout Fishing in America


“He learned about life at sixteen, first from Dostoevsky and then from the whores of New Orleans.”
― Richard Brautigan, quote from Trout Fishing in America



“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, quote from Trout Fishing in America


“USED TROUT STREAM FOR SALE.
MUST BE SEEN TO BE APPRECIATED.”
― Richard Brautigan, quote from Trout Fishing in America


“You're not fooling anyone by taking your clothes off when you go to bed.”
― Richard Brautigan, quote from Trout Fishing in America


“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, quote from Trout Fishing in America


“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, quote from Trout Fishing in America



“I remember mistaking an old woman for a trout stream in Vermont, and I had to beg her pardon.”
― Richard Brautigan, quote from Trout Fishing in America


“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, quote from Trout Fishing in America


“I always wanted to write a book that ended with the word Mayonnaise.”
― Richard Brautigan, quote from Trout Fishing in America


“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.”
― Richard Brautigan, quote from Trout Fishing in America


“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, quote from Trout Fishing in America



“We were all silent except for blink, blink, blink, blink, blink.”
― Richard Brautigan, quote from Trout Fishing in America


“he was leaving for America, often only a place in the mind.”
― Richard Brautigan, quote from Trout Fishing in America


“I walked home past the glass whiskers of the houses, reflecting the downward rushing waterfalls of night.”
― Richard Brautigan, quote from Trout Fishing in America


“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, quote from Trout Fishing in America


“The fish was a twelve-inch rainbow trout with a huge hump on its back. A hunchback trout.”
― Richard Brautigan, quote from Trout Fishing in America



“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.”
― Richard Brautigan, quote from Trout Fishing in America


“He created his own Kool-Aid reality and was able to illuminate himself by it.”
― Richard Brautigan, quote from Trout Fishing in America


“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.”
― Richard Brautigan, quote from Trout Fishing in America


“It only made sense that drinking intelligent blood would make intelligent fleas.”
― Richard Brautigan, quote from Trout Fishing in America


About the author

Richard Brautigan
Born place: in Tacoma, Washington, The United States
Born date January 30, 1935
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