Richard Brautigan Quotes

When you are alone and too tired even to turn on any of your devices, you let yourself linger in a past stacked among your pillows.

While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.

Looking out at the road rushing under my wheels. Looking back at the years gone by like so many summer fields.

Time, where did you go? / Why did you leave me here alone? / Wait, don't go so fast / I'm missing the moments as they pass

I'm 65 years old. Everyday the future looks a little bit darker. But the past, even the grimy parts of it, well, it just keeps on getting brighter all the time.

Nothing's so dainty sweet as lovely melancholy.

From about 5 years old on, I was very contemplative and started to become constantly filled with nostalgia for the present moment and the feeling that it's always fleeting.

When you are old and gray and full of sleep, and nodding by the fire, take down this book and slowly read, and dream of the soft look your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep.

The winding down of summer puts me in a heavy philosophical mood.

As I've gotten older I've occasionally found myself nostalgic for earlier periods of solitude, though I realize that's also likely a false nostalgia, as I know there was nothing I wanted more during those periods than to not be alone, whatever that means.

I spent a lot of my childhood sat on a wall thinking, waiting for my mum to pick me up.

I sit at my window gazing The world passes by, nods to me And is gone.

Every book is an image of solitude. It is a tangible object that one can pick up, put down, open, and close, and its words represent many months if not many years, of one man’s solitude, so that with each word one reads in a book one might say to himself that he is confronting a particle of that solitude

I wake up thinking of yesterday. The joy is in remembering; the pain is in knowing it was yesterday.

That moment - to this ... may be years in the way they measure, but it's only one sentence back in my mind - there are so many days when living stops and pulls up and sits and waits like a train on the rails. I pass the hotel at 8 and at 5; there are cats in the alleys and bottles and bums, and I look up at the window and think, I no longer know where you are, and I walk on and wonder where the living goes when it stops.

There rises the moon, broad and tranquil, through the branches of a walnut tree on a hill opposite. I apostrophize it in the words of Faust; "O gentle moon, that lookest for the last time upon my agonies!" --or something to that effect.

Sundown, yellow moon, I replay the past I know every scene by heart, they all went by so fast

Hour of nostalgia, hour of happiness, hour of solitude.

So here I sit in the early candle-light of old age-I and my book-casting backward glances over out travel'd road.

And there I sat, long long ago, waiting for the world to know me.

That is why I write - to try to turn sadness into longing, solitude into remembrance.

Strange thoughts brew in your heart when you spend too much time with old books