Tonya > Tonya's Quotes

“My ambition is handicapped by laziness”
― Charles Bukowski, Factotum

“I've never been lonely. I've been in a room -- I've felt suicidal. I've been depressed. I've felt awful -- awful beyond all -- but I never felt that one other person could enter that room and cure what was bothering me...or that any number of people could enter that room. In other words, loneliness is something I've never been bothered with because I've always had this terrible itch for solitude. It's being at a party, or at a stadium full of people cheering for something, that I might feel loneliness. I'll quote Ibsen, "The strongest men are the most alone." I've never thought, "Well, some beautiful blonde will come in here and give me a fuck-job, rub my balls, and I'll feel good." No, that won't help. You know the typical crowd, "Wow, it's Friday night, what are you going to do? Just sit there?" Well, yeah. Because there's nothing out there. It's stupidity. Stupid people mingling with stupid people. Let them stupidify themselves. I've never been bothered with the need to rush out into the night. I hid in bars, because I didn't want to hide in factories. That's all. Sorry for all the millions, but I've never been lonely. I like myself. I'm the best form of entertainment I have. Let's drink more wine!”
― Charles Bukowski

“Real loneliness is not necessarily limited to when you are alone.”
― Charles Bukowski

“I felt like crying but nothing came out. it was just a sort of sad sickness, sick sad, when you can't feel any worse. I think you know it. I think everybody knows it now and then. but I think I have known it pretty often, too often.”
― Charles Bukowski, Tales of Ordinary Madness

“A love like that was a serious illness, an illness from which you never entirely recover.”
― Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last

“being alone never felt right. sometimes it felt good, but it never felt right.”
― Charles Bukowski, Women

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

“The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.”
― 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

“People with no morals often considered themselves more free, but mostly they lacked the ability to feel or love.”
― Charles Bukowski, Women

“Pain is strange. A cat killing a bird, a car accident, a fire.... Pain arrives, BANG, and there it is, it sits on you. It's real. And to anybody watching, you look foolish. Like you've suddenly become an idiot. There's no cure for it unless you know somebody who understands how you feel, and knows how to help.”
― Charles Bukowski

“there is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock”
― Charles Bukowski, Love Is a Dog from Hell

“The shortest distance between two points is often unbearable.”
― Charles Bukowski

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

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

“I was drawn to all the wrong things: I liked to drink, I was lazy, I didn't have a god, politics, ideas, ideals. I was settled into nothingness; a kind of non-being, and I accepted it. I didn't make for an interesting person. I didn't want to be interesting, it was too hard. What I really wanted was only a soft, hazy space to live in, and to be left alone.”
― Charles Bukowski

“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

“each man's hell is in a different place:
mine is just up and behind
my ruined face.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Do you hate people?”

“I don't hate them...I just feel better when they're not around.”
― Charles Bukowski, Barfly

“We are
Born like this
Into this
Into these carefully mad wars
Into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness
Into bars where people no longer speak to each other
Into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings
Born into this
Into hospitals which are so expensive that it’s cheaper to die
Into lawyers who charge so much it’s cheaper to plead guilty
Into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed
Into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes”
― Charles Bukowski

“It was true that I didn’t have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?”
― Charles Bukowski, Factotum

“my beerdrunk soul is sadder than all the dead christmas trees of the world.”
― Charles Bukowski

“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,
and I will remember your small room
the feel of you
the light in the window
your records
your books
our morning coffee
our noons our nights
our bodies spilled together
sleeping
the tiny flowing currents
immediate and forever
your leg my leg
your arm my arm
your smile and the warmth
of you
who made me laugh
again.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Baby," I said, "I'm a genius but nobody knows it but me.”
― Charles Bukowski, Factotum

“We are like roses that have never bothered to bloom when we should have bloomed and it is as if the sun has become disgusted with waiting”
― Charles Bukowski

“Life's as kind as you let it be.”
― Charles Bukowski, Hot Water Music

“This is very important -- to take leisure time. Pace is the essence. Without stopping entirely and doing nothing at all for great periods, you're gonna lose everything...just to do nothing at all, very, very important. And how many people do this in modern society? Very few. That's why they're all totally mad, frustrated, angry and hateful.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Great art is horseshit, buy tacos.”
― Charles Bukowski

“in that drunken place
you would
like to hand your heart to her
and say
touch it
but then
give it back.”
― Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last

“she was consumed by 3 simple things:
drink, despair, loneliness; and 2 more:
youth and beauty”
― Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last