Life & Wisdom Quote by Richard Brautigan

Brautigan’s line lands with the soft thud of a postcard you find years later: casual, a little pretty, and quietly devastating. He sets up a mismatch between the world’s steady, low-effort continuities and the human talent for complication. “Simple things” aren’t romantic abstractions; they’re the stubborn basics - sunlight, meals, errands, a song on the radio, the fact that the day keeps happening. They “go on” with indifferent momentum. Against that, “we become more difficult” reads like both confession and diagnosis: not simply that life gets hard, but that we do. We accrue defenses, preferences, anxieties, ideologies, habits of suspicion. Difficulty becomes a personality.

The intent feels less like a moral lecture than a shrug of recognition: adulthood as a kind of self-interference. Brautigan’s best trick is his tone of mild surprise (“It’s strange how...”), which masks how sharp the observation is. The sentence is engineered to make you hear the creak of time: the world keeps its tempo while your inner life starts demanding more conditions to be satisfied.

Context matters. Writing in the long wake of 1960s American optimism, Brautigan often treated innocence and pastoral simplicity as things you could glimpse but not permanently inhabit. The subtext is a lament for how quickly the self becomes bureaucratic. The tragedy isn’t that simplicity disappears; it’s that it persists, available, while we render ourselves increasingly unable to receive it.