Quotes from Charles Bukowski

theres no chance at all: we are all trapped by a singular fate. nobody ever finds the one.

for a man of 55 who didn't get laid until he was 23 and not very often until he was 50 I think that I should stay listed via Pacific Telephone until I get as much as the average man has had

Why can't you be decent to people? she asked. Fear, I said.

Love it or leave it

Well, people got attatched. Once you cut the umbilical cord they attatched to the other things. Sight, sound, sex, money, mirages, mothers, masturbation, murder, and Monday morning hangovers.

And remember the old dogs who fought so well: Hemingway, Celine, Dostoevsky, Hamsun. If you think they didn't go crazy in tiny rooms just like you're doing now without women without food without hope then you're not ready.

People with no morals often considered themselves more free, but mostly they lacked the ability to feel or to love. So they became swingers. The dead fucking the dead. There was no gamble or humor in their game - it was corpse fucking corpse.

And then she would smile, to show me how, and it was the saddest smile I ever saw.

when I am feeling low all I have to do is watch my cats and my courage returns.         I study these creatures.         they are my teachers.

then sit down and write or stand up and write but write no matter what the other people are doing, no matter what they will do to you.

a life can change in a tenth of a second. or sometimes it can take 70 years.

I could never accept life as it was, I could never gobble down all its poisons bu there were parts, tenuous magic parts open for the asking.

I love you but don't know what to do.

it was going to be all right. at last. for a while.

It's the order of things: each one gets a taste of honey then the knife.

She knew what she wanted and it wasn't me. I know more women like that than any other kind.

It was only the matter of a new voice. Nobody listened to an old voice anymore. Old voices became a part of one's self, like a fingernail.

But she projected vitality - you knew that she was there.

I broke that town in half like a wooden match.

Dear child, I only did to you what the sparrow did to you; I am old when it is fashionable to be young; I cry when it is fashionable to laugh. I hated you when it would have taken less courage to love.

Nobody can save you but yourself. You will be put again and again into nearly impossible situations. They will attempt again and again through subterfuge, guise, and force to make you submit, quit and/or die quietly inside. But don't, don't, don't. It's a war not easily won, but if anything is worth winning then this is it. Nobody can save you but yourself, and you're worth saving.

I once lay in a white hospital for the dying and the dying self, where some god pissed a rain of reason to make things grow only to die, where on my knees I prayed for LIGHT, I prayed for l*i*g*h*t, and praying crawled like a blind slug into the web where threads of wind stuck against my mind and I died of pity for Man, for myself, on a cross without nails, watching in fear as the pig belches in his sty, farts, blinks and eats.

That's how they hooked you—they gave you just enough to keep alive but they never gave you enough so you could finally escape.

i dunno, i said, but i have an idea that people who don't think too much tend to look younger longer