Vanessa > Vanessa's Quotes

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

“Anything is a waste of time unless you are fucking well or creating well or getting well or looming toward a kind of phantom-love-happiness.”
― Charles Bukowski

“unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don't do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don't do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.”
― Charles Bukowski

“It was like the beginning of life and laughter. It was the real meaning of the sun”
― Charles Bukowski, Factotum

“Love is a form of prejudice. You love what you need, you love what makes you feel good, you love what is convenient. How can you say you love one person when there are ten thousand people in the world that you would love more if you ever met them? But you'll never meet them. All right, so we do the best we can. Granted. But we must still realize that love is just the result of a chance encounter. Most people make too much of it. On these grounds a good fuck is not to be entirely scorned. But that's the result of a chance meeting too. You're damned right. Drink up. We'll have another.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Without literature, life is hell.”
― Charles Bukowski

“I want so much that is not here and do not know
where to go.”
― Charles Bukowski, The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems, 1946-1966

“The fuckers. There, I feel better. God-damned human race. There, I feel better.”
― Charles Bukowski, The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship

“The Laughing Heart

your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.”
― Charles Bukowski, Betting on the Muse: Poems & Stories

“writers are desperate people and when they stop being desperate they stop being writers.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Find what you love and let it kill you.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Our disappointment sits between us.”
― Charles Bukowski, The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems, 1946-1966

“love be damned now
as love was damned when it
first arrived.”
― Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last

“Beware
Those Who
Are ALWAYS
READING
BOOKS”
― Charles Bukowski, The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems, 1946-1966

“He asked, "What makes a man a writer?" "Well," I said, "it's simple. You either get it down on paper, or jump off a bridge.”
― Charles Bukowski

“I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there”
― Bukowski C.

“If you're going to try, go all the way. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives, jobs and maybe your mind.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Those faces you see every day on the streets were not created entirely without hope: be kind to them: like you they have not escaped.”
― Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last

“You begin saving the world by saving one person at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Memory... is an internal rumor.”
― George Santayana

“Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.”
― George Santayana

“With you a part of me hath passed away;
For in the peopled forest of my mind
A tree made leafless by this wintry wind
Shall never don again its green array.
Chapel and fireside, country road and bay,
Have something of their friendliness resigned;
Another, if I would, I could not find,
And I am grown much older in a day.
But yet I treasure in my memory
Your gift of charity, and young hearts ease,
And the dear honour of your amity;
For these once mine, my life is rich with these.
And I scarce know which part may greater be,--
What I keep of you, or you rob from me.”
― George Santayana

“I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.”
― D.H. Lawrence, The Complete Poems of D.H. Lawrence

“Certainly the most destructive vice if you like, that a person can have. More than pride, which is supposedly the number one of the cardinal sins - is self pity. Self pity is the worst possible emotion anyone can have. And the most destructive. It is, to slightly paraphrase what Wilde said about hatred, and I think actually hatred's a subset of self pity and not the other way around - ' It destroys everything around it, except itself '.

Self pity will destroy relationships, it'll destroy anything that's good, it will fulfill all the prophecies it makes and leave only itself. And it's so simple to imagine that one is hard done by, and that things are unfair, and that one is underappreciated, and that if only one had had a chance at this, only one had had a chance at that, things would have gone better, you would be happier if only this, that one is unlucky. All those things. And some of them may well even be true. But, to pity oneself as a result of them is to do oneself an enormous disservice.

I think it's one of things we find unattractive about the american culture, a culture which I find mostly, extremely attractive, and I like americans and I love being in america. But, just occasionally there will be some example of the absolutely ravening self pity that they are capable of, and you see it in their talk shows. It's an appalling spectacle, and it's so self destructive. I almost once wanted to publish a self help book saying 'How To Be Happy by Stephen Fry : Guaranteed success'. And people buy this huge book and it's all blank pages, and the first page would just say - ' Stop Feeling Sorry For Yourself - And you will be happy '. Use the rest of the book to write down your interesting thoughts and drawings, and that's what the book would be, and it would be true. And it sounds like 'Oh that's so simple', because it's not simple to stop feeling sorry for yourself, it's bloody hard. Because we do feel sorry for ourselves, it's what Genesis is all about.”
― Stephen Fry

“Fits of anger, vexation,and bitterness against ourselves tend to pride and they spring from no other source than self-love, which is disturbed and upset at seeing that it is imperfect.”
― Francis de Sale

“The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.”
― Milan Kundera, Ignorance

“WINE comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That's all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and sigh.”
― W.B. Yeats

“What can be explained is not poetry.”
― W.B. Yeats

“Letting go doesn't mean that you don't care about someone anymore. It's just realizing that the only person you really have control over is yourself.”
― Deborah Reber, Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul: 101 Stories of Life, Love and Learning

“Pain will leave you, when you let go”
― Jeremy Aldana