Clint > Clint's Quotes

“What a weary time those years were -- to have the desire and the need to live but not the ability.”
― Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

“I guess the only time most people think about injustice is when it happens to them.”
― Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

“News travels fast in places where nothing much ever happens.”
― Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

“Fiction is an improvement on life”
― Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

“Getting drunk was good. I decided that I would always like getting drunk. It took away the obvious and maybe if you could get away from the obvious often enough, you wouldn't become so obvious yourself.”
― Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

“I had noticed that both in the very poor and very rich extremes of society the mad were often allowed to mingle freely.”
― Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

“It seemed better to delay thinking.”
― Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

“People don't do me much good.”
― Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

“If you can hit a guy once, you can hit him twice.”
― Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

“I'd decided the campus was just a place to hide. There were some campus freaks who stayed on forever. The whole college scene was soft. They never told you what to expect out there in the real world. They just crammed you with theory and never told you how hard the pavements were. A college education could destroy an individual for life. Books could make you soft. When you put them down, and really went out there, then you needed to know what they never told you.”
― Charles Bukowski , Ham on Rye

“Your parents don't give you much love, do they?'
'I don't need that stuff,' I told her.
'Henry, everybody needs love.'
'I don't need anything.'
'You poor boy.”
― Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

“I was just a 50-cent turd floating around in the
green ocean of life.”
― Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

“When you're having an asthma attack, you don't have any breath. When you don't have any breath, it's hard to speak. You're limited by the amount of air you can spend from your lungs. That's not much, something between three to six words. It gives the word a meaning. You're searching through the piles of words in your head, picking the most important ones. And they have a cost. It's not like the healthy people that take out every word that has accumulated in their head like garbage. When someone, while having an asthma attack, says "I love you" or "I really love you", there's a difference. A word difference. And a word is a lot, because that word could have been "sit", "Ventolin" or even "ambulance".”
― Etgar Keret, צנורות

“what matters most is how well you walk through the fire”
― Charles Bukowski

“Good sense is, of all things among men, the most equally distributed; for every one thinks himself so abundantly provided with it, that those even who are the most difficult to satisfy in everything else, do not usually desire a larger measure of this quality than they already possess. And in this it is not likely that all are mistaken the conviction is rather to be held as testifying that the power of judging aright and of distinguishing truth from error, which is properly what is called good sense or reason, is by nature equal in all men; and that the diversity of our opinions, consequently, does not arise from some being endowed with a larger share of reason than others, but solely from this, that we conduct our thoughts along different ways, and do not fix our attention on the same objects. For to be possessed of a vigorous mind is not enough; the prime requisite is rightly to apply it. The greatest minds, as they are capable of the highest excellences, are open likewise to the greatest aberrations; and those who travel very slowly may yet make far greater progress, provided they keep always to the straight road, than those who, while they run, forsake it.”
― René Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy

“So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“Show me a filthy public restroom and I’ll show you a society where discipline and order have broken down.”
― Lourd Ernest H. de Veyra, The Best of This Is A Crazy Planets

“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.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering...”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Sometimes memory can be real bitch.”
― Lourd Ernest H. de Veyra, The Best of This Is A Crazy Planets

“Sometimes I wonder if, instead of falling madly in love, we should aspire to fall sanely in love. But then, what would be the point?”
― Jessica Zafra, Twisted V

“We read because we are essentially alone.”
― Jessica Zafra, Twisted 8: The Night of the Living Twisted

“The truth was simpler: It takes longer to type a sentence than it does to kill a man.”
― Patricia Evangelista, Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country

“This is a book about the dead, and the people who are left behind. It is also a personal story, written in my own voice, as a citizen of a nation I cannot recognize as my own. The thousands who died were killed with the permission of my people. I am writing this book because I refuse to offer mine.”
― Patricia Evangelista, Some People Need Killing

“Coming home at last
At the end of the year
I wept to find
My old umbilical cord.”
― Matsuo Bashō, The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches

“I shall talk to you through trees, through the arms of dancers, through sweet words uttered by many lovers.

The arms of dancers round you shall be my arms.

The eyes of men admiring you shall be my eyes.

I have many arms, many eyes.

It is that, loving you, I have become many lovers.”
― Jose Garcia Villa, Doveglion: Collected Poems

“A poem
is
language
built

to the
struc-
ture of a
flower.”
― Jose Garcia Villa, Doveglion: Collected Poems

“I,it,was,that,saw,
God,dancing,on,phosphorescent,toes,
Among,the,strawberries.

It,could,have,been,moonlight,or,
Daylight—or,no,light,at,all.
His,feet,cast,light,on,all.

On,phosphorescent,feet,
On,phosphorescent,feet,He,danced,
And,His,eyes,were,closed:

He,made,the,strawberries,tremble!
Yet,He,hurt,not,the,little,one,
But,gave,them,ripeness,all.”
― Jose Garcia Villa, Doveglion: Collected Poems

“I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.”
― Jorge Luis Borges