Richard Fariña > Quotes

“In the room, the cats eat mad spaghetti
Talking of Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
--from "The Dream Song of J. Alfred Kerowack.”
― Richard Fariña

“Been down so long it looks like up to me.”
― Richard Farina

“we mistake induction for generation.”
― Richard Fariña, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me

“this is a nervous little decade we’re playing with”
― Richard Fariña, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me

“Still, he was in love. And love was a consolation. Like a sideshow panacea for symptomatic ills, it soothed anxiety, pain, and doubt; eased fear and insomnia, purged the more accessible demons, and apparently acted as a mild laxative.”
― Richard Fariña, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me

“I cool it here, dig? You never knew anybody so cool. I'm Emir Feisal in Constantinople in 1916, dig, that's how cool I am. This whole scene...I keep at thirty-seven degrees Fahrenheit. Average.”
― Richard Fariña, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me

“All about them the golden girls, shopping for dainties in Lairville. Even in the midst of the wild-maned winter's chill, skipping about in sneakers and sweatsocks, cream-colored raincoats. A generation in the mold, the Great White Pattern Maker lying in his prosperous bed, grinning while the liquid cools. But he does not know my bellows. Someone there is who will huff and will puff. The sophmores in their new junior blazers, like Saturday's magazines out on Thursday. Freshly covered textbooks from the campus store, slide rules dangling in leather, sheathed broadswords, chinos scrubbed to the virgin fiber, starch pressed into straight-razor creases, Oxford shirts buttoned down under crewneck sweaters, blue eyes bobbing everywhere, stunned by the android synthesis of one-a-day vitamins, Tropicana orange juice, fresh country eggs, Kraft homogenized cheese, tetra-packs of fortified milk, Cheerios with sun-ripened bananas, corn-flake-breaded chicken, hot fudge sundaes, Dairy Queen root beer floats, cheeseburgers, hybrid creamed corn, riboflavin extract, brewer's yeast, crunchy peanut butter, tuna fish casseroles, pancakes and imitation maple syrup, chuck steaks, occasional Maine lobster, Social Tea biscuits, defatted wheat germ, Kellogg's Concentrate, chopped string beans, Wonderbread, Birds Eye frozen peas, shredded spinach, French-fried onion rings, escarole salads, lentil stews, sundry fowl innards, Pecan Sandies, Almond Joys, aureomycin, penicillin, antitetanus toxoid, smallpox vaccine, Alka-Seltzer, Empirin, Vicks VapoRub, Arrid with chlorophyll, Super Anahist nose spray, Dristan decongestant, billions of cubic feet of wholesome, reconditioned breathing air, and the more wholesome breeds of fraternal exercise available to Western man. Ah, the regimented good will and force-fed confidence of those who are not meek but will inherit the earth all the same.”
― Richard Fariña, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me

“be careful. you are what you eat.”
― richard farina

“The conscience of my elusive race gives not a fig for me, baby. But I endure, if you know what I mean.”
― Richard Fariña, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me

“god, they say, is love. and some one's got to pass the word.”
― Richard Fariña, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me

“Been down so long it looks like up to me” is NOT a quote from Richard Fariña. It his the title of his novel. It is, in fact a quote from the 1928 blues song "I Will Turn Your Money Green".

Doesn't anybody vett these things?”
― Richard Fariña, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me