Dev > Dev's Quotes

“Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.”
― Charles Bukowski

“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

“You have to die a few times before you can really
live.”
― Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last

“there are worse things
than being alone
but it often takes
decades to realize this
and most often when you do
it's too late
and there's nothing worse
than too late”
― Charles Bukowski

“If you're losing your soul and you know it, then you've still got a soul left to lose”
― Charles Bukowski and Carl Weissner

“Some lose all mind and become soul,insane.
some lose all soul and become mind, intellectual.
some lose both and become accepted”
― Charles Bukowski

“There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I'm not going to let anybody see you.”
― Charles Bukowski

“you boys can keep your virgins
give me hot old women in high heels
with asses that forgot to get old.”
― Charles Bukowski, Love Is a Dog from Hell

“there is always one woman to save you from another and as that woman saves you she makes ready to destroy”
― Charles Bukowski, Love Is a Dog from Hell

“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

“I often carry things to read
so that I will not have to look at
the people.”
― Charles Bukowski, The Last Night of the Earth Poems

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

“If you have the ability to love, love yourself first.”
― Charles Bukowski

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

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

“some men never
die
and some men never
live

but we're all alive
tonight.”
― Charles Bukowski, You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense

“Beasts bounding through time.

Van Gogh writing his brother for paints
Hemingway testing his shotgun
Celine going broke as a doctor of medicine
the impossibility of being human
Villon expelled from Paris for being a thief
Faulkner drunk in the gutters of his town
the impossibility of being human
Burroughs killing his wife with a gun
Mailer stabbing his
the impossibility of being human
Maupassant going mad in a rowboat
Dostoevsky lined up against a wall to be shot
Crane off the back of a boat into the propeller
the impossibility
Sylvia with her head in the oven like a baked potato
Harry Crosby leaping into that Black Sun
Lorca murdered in the road by the Spanish troops
the impossibility
Artaud sitting on a madhouse bench
Chatterton drinking rat poison
Shakespeare a plagiarist
Beethoven with a horn stuck into his head against deafness
the impossibility the impossibility
Nietzsche gone totally mad
the impossibility of being human
all too human
this breathing
in and out
out and in
these punks
these cowards
these champions
these mad dogs of glory

moving this little bit of light toward
us
impossibly”
― Charles Bukowski, You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense

“I was their bar freak, they needed me
to make themselves feel
better.
just like, at times, I needed that
graveyard.”
― Charles Bukowski, You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense

“they simply never understand,
do they,
that sometimes solitude
is
one of the most beautiful
things
on earth?”
― Charles Bukowski

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

“Poetry is what happens when nothing else can.”
― Charles Bukowski

“I remember awakening one morning and finding everything smeared with the color of forgotten love.”
― Charles Bukowski, What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire

“We don’t even ask happiness, just a little less pain.”
― Charles Bukowski

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

“I am a dead man who wanders
registered nowhere”
― Ingeborg Bachmann, Darkness Spoken: The Collected Poems of Ingeborg Bachmann

“As it has been said:
Love and a cough
cannot be concealed.
Even a small cough.
Even a small love.”
― Anne Sexton

“I am a collection of dismantled almosts.”
― Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

“I am alone here in my own mind.
There is no map
and there is no road.
It is one of a kind
just as yours is.”
― Anne Sexton

“Only my books anoint me,
and a few friends,
those who reach into my veins.”
― Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems

“Sometimes the soul takes pictures of things it has wished for, but never seen.”
― Anne Sexton