Amelia > Amelia's Quotes

“Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I'm not going to make it, but you laugh inside — remembering all the times you've felt that way.”
― 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

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

“That's the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen.”
― Charles Bukowski, Women

“I wanted the whole world or nothing.”
― Charles Bukowski, Post Office

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

“Drinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of the standardism of everyday life, out of everything being the same. It yanks you out of your body and your mind and throws you against the wall. I have the feeling that drinking is a form of suicide where you're allowed to return to life and begin all over the next day. It's like killing yourself, and then you're reborn. I guess I've lived about ten or fifteen thousand lives now.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Sometimes you just have to pee in the sink.”
― Charles Bukowski

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

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

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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

“The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little bit more off you, until there was nothing left. At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole god-damned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidates who reminded them most of themselves. I had no interests. I had no interest in anything. I had no idea how I was going to escape. At least the others had some taste for life. They seemed to understand something that I didn't understand. Maybe I was lacking. It was possible. I often felt inferior. I just wanted to get away from them. But there was no place to go.”
― Charles Bukowski

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

“dogs and angels are not
very far apart”
― Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last

“There are times when those eyes inside your brain stare back at you.”
― Charles Bukowski, What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire

“It wasn’t my day. My week. My month. My year. My life. God damn it.”
― Charles Bukowski, Pulp: Charles Bukowski's Final Hardboiled Noir Comedy – Lady Death, Aliens, and the Absurd

“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.”
― Charles Bukowski

“some moments are nice, some are
nicer, some are even worth
writing
about.”
― Charles Bukowski, War All the Time: Poems 1981 - 1984

“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

“I'm going, she said. I love you but you're
crazy, you're doomed.”
― Charles Bukowski, Love Is a Dog from Hell

“In the morning it was morning and I was still alive.”
― Charles Bukowski, Post Office

“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

“Human relationships didn't work anyhow. Only the first two weeks had any zing, then the participants lost their interest. Masks dropped away and real people began to appear: cranks, imbeciles, the demented, the vengeful, sadists, killers. Modern society had created its own kind and they feasted on each other. It was a duel to the death--in a cesspool.”
― Charles Bukowski, Women

“whiskey makes the heart beat faster
but it sure doesn't help the
mind and isn't it funny how you can ache just
from the deadly drone of
existence?”
― Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last