Richard Brautigan Quotes

We bury love; Forgetfulness grows over it like grass: That is a thing to weep for, not the dead.

I cannot love as I have loved, And yet I know not why; It is the one great woe of life To feel all feeling die.

If I speak of Vienna it must be in the past tense, as a man speaks of a woman he has loved and who is dead.

There is a phrase in French, which means 'to miss.' To pass by. To not be able to stop. You love someone and someone loves you, but it just can't work for different reasons.

As the possibility of a relationship had faded, Emma had endeavored to harden herself to Dexter's indifference and these days a remark like this caused no more pain than, say, a tennis ball thrown sharply at the back of her head.

She must have sensed she never really had him. That was a sadness of hers, he knew.

Written kisses don't reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts.

The only love from which a man never recuperates is the one he never had. The eternal and untarnished illusion.

I would have done the same thing I did. I would have put all my energy into loving someone that wasn't you. I would have tried in vain, every day, to not think about you, and what could have been. What should have been. I would have tried to convince myself that there's no such thing as true love, except for the love you yourself make work, even though I know better....The bottom line is I never had any business marrying anyone who wasn't you.

nothing grieves more deeply or pathetically than one half of a great love that isn’t meant to be.

I think there must have been some other girl printed somewhere in his heart, for he was a man of love and his wife was not a woman to show her feelings.

Fro and to in my dreams to you To the haunting tune of the harp For the price I paid when you died that day I paid that day with my heart Fro and to in my dreams to you With the breaking of my heart Ne'er more again will I sing this song Ne'er more will I hear the harp.

She wasn't mine. She hadn't been mine for a long time. She shouldn't be here and I shouldn't have asked. So instead of reassuring her, I kept leaning agains the tree looking like the devil and hoping she turned and ran. ~ The Vincent Boys

Of love that never found his earthly close, What sequel? Streaming eyes and breaking hearts; Or all the same as if he had not been?

‎Keep your love, I have no use for it anymore.

In another life, I would be your girl, we keep all our promises, the us against the world, In another life, I would make you stay, So I don't have to say you were the one that got away the one that got away

She fell asleep, lying there, her hand clasping his. Her last awareness, before she surrendered the responsibility of consciousness, was the sense of an enormous void, the void of a city and of a continent, where she would never be able to find the man whom she had no right to seek.

Half the night I waste in sighs, Half in dreams I sorrow after The delight of early skies; In a wakeful dose I sorrow For the hand, the lips, the eyes, For the meeting of the morrow, The delight of happy laughter, The delight of low replies.

Even so you have managed to live that love in the only way possible for you. Losing it before it happened.

He'd stopped trying to bring her back. She only came back when she felt like it anyway, in dreams and lies and broken-down deja-vu.

I'm so sorry for loving you, I'm so sorry.... But it was such a wonderful dream, my love, such a wonderful dream.

Dreams would always end with you, and then mornings would steal you away with a cruelty that haunted my days.

And he absolutely had to find her at once to tell her that he adored her, but the large audience before him separated him from the door, and the notes reaching him through a succession of hands said that she was not available; that she was inaugurating a fire; that she had married an american businessman; that she had become a character in a novel; that she was dead.