Happy birthday, Richard Brautigan! Here are some quotes from this superb writer’s writing:

“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.”

—“All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace”

“All of us have a place in history. Mine is clouds.”

—The Tokyo-Montana Express

“Probably the closest things to perfection are the huge absolutely empty holes that astronomers have recently discovered in space. If there’s nothing there, how can anything go wrong?”

—An Unfortunate Woman: A Journey

“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.”

“Finding is losing something else. I think about, perhaps even mourn, what I lost to find this.”

—Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork

Karma Repair Kit: Items 1-4

1. Get enough food to eat,
and eat it.

“One day Time will die And love will bury it”

“It’s pretty hard to have faith when everybody is trying to lock you up.”

—A Confederate General from Big Sur

“I think that education provides the tools for a person to understand and enjoy life on this planet…The more you know, the more you can enjoy during our brief stay here. You can’t get too much education. It should be a lifelong process…In 47 years, I’ve learned a great deal about life, now all I have to do is remember it…I don’t believe that being older makes you wiser. I believe in application of knowledge and information. Often the wise old elders are the ones who lead others into oblivion.”

“I work very, very hard to make things appear very, very simple.”

“People often ask me which of my books is my favorite. And I tell them that it hasn’t been written yet.”

“I’m just a writer and I just want to continue writing books that people want to read.”