Quotes from Charles Bukowski

this time has finished me.

Something that never happens anywhere at any time.

my youth, one time, that time I knew even through the nothingness, it was a celebration of something not to do but only know.

Love is a fog that burns with the first daylight of reality.

We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.

one more creature dizzy with love

I will remember the kisses, our lips raw with love, and how you gave me everything you had and how I offered you what was left of me.

If you have the ability to love, love yourself first.

Humanity, you never had it to begin with.

You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.

The male, for all his bravado and exploration, is the loyal one, the one who generally feels love. The female is skilled at betrayal and torture and damnation.

If there are junk yards in hell, love is the dog that guards the gates.

Love came hard and very seldom. When it did it was usually for the wrong reasons.

Love is a horse with a broken leg trying to stand while 45,000 people watch.

People in love often become edgy, dangerous. They lose their sense of perspective.

Once a woman turns against you, forget it. They can love you, then something turns in them. They can watch you dying in a gutter, run over by a car, and they'll spit on you.

Love is all right for those who can handle the psychic overload. It's like trying to carry a full garbage can on your back over a rushing river of piss.

I want to let her know though that all the nights sleeping beside her even the useless arguments were things ever splendid and the hard words I ever feared to say can now be said: I love you.

I was in love again. I was in trouble

A love like that was a serious illness, an illness from which you never entirely recover.

I hated you when it would have taken less courage to love.

love be damned now as love was damned when it first arrived.

Don't do it. Don't love me.

My writing is jagged and harsh, I want it to remain that way; I don't want it smoothed out.