Mary Beth > Mary's Quotes

“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

“Great art is horseshit, buy tacos.”
― 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

“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

“the free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it - basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them.”
― Charles Bukowski, Tales of Ordinary Madness

“Show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and 8 times out of 9 I'll show you a man with detestable spiritual qualities.”
― Charles Bukowski

“It's better to do a dull thing with style than a dangerous thing without it.”
― Charles Bukowski

“the tigers have found me
and I do not care.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Style is the answer to everything.
A fresh way to approach a dull or dangerous thing
To do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without it
To do a dangerous thing with style is what I call art

Bullfighting can be an art
Boxing can be an art
Loving can be an art
Opening a can of sardines can be an art

Not many have style
Not many can keep style
I have seen dogs with more style than men,
although not many dogs have style.
Cats have it with abundance.

When Hemingway put his brains to the wall with a shotgun,
that was style.
Or sometimes people give you style
Joan of Arc had style
John the Baptist
Jesus
Socrates
Caesar
García Lorca.

I have met men in jail with style.
I have met more men in jail with style than men out of jail.
Style is the difference, a way of doing, a way of being done.
Six herons standing quietly in a pool of water,
or you, naked, walking out of the bathroom without seeing me.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Too often the people complain that they have done nothing with their
lives and then they wait for somebody to tell them that this isn't so.”
― Charles Bukowski, What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire

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

“we were in her big oak
bed
facing south
so much of the rest of the
time
that I memorized
each wrinkle in the
drapes
and especially
all the cracks in the
ceiling.

I used to play games with
her with that ceiling.

"see those cracks up
there?"

"where?"

"look where I'm pointing..."

"o.k."

"now, see those cracks, see the
pattern? it forms and image. do you see
what it is?"

"umm, umm ..."

"go on, what is it?"

"I know! It's a man on top of a woman!"

"wrong. it's a flamingo standing
by a stream."

. . .

we finally got free of
one another.
it's sad but it's
standard operating procedure
(I am constantly confused by
the lack of durability in human
affairs).

I suppose the parting was
unhappy
maybe even ugly.
it's been 3 or 4
years now
and I wonder if she
ever thinks of
me, of what I am doing?”
― Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last

“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

“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

“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

“If you are going to try, go all the way or don't even start. If you follow it you will be alive with the gods. It is the only good fight there is.”
― Charles Bukowski

“it was like any other
relationship, there was
jealousy on both sides,
there were split-ups and
reconciliations.
there were also fragmented moments of
great peace and beauty.

I often tried to get away from her and
she tied to get away from me
but it was difficult:
Cupid, in his strange way, was really
there.”
― Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last

“But now and then, a woman walks up, full blossom, a woman just bursting out of her dress…a sex creature, a curse, the end of it all.”
― Charles Bukowski, Post Office

“I was sentimental about many things: a woman’s shoes under the bed; one hairpin left behind on the dresser; the way they said, 'I’m going to pee.' hair ribbons; walking down the boulevard with them at 1:30 in the afternoon, just two people walking together; the long nights of drinking and smoking; talking; the arguments; thinking of suicide; eating together and feeling good; the jokes; the laughter out of nowhere; feeling miracles in the air; being in a parked car together; comparing past loves at 3am; being told you snore; hearing her snore; mothers, daughters, sons, cats, dogs; sometimes death and sometimes divorce; but always carring on, always seeing it through; reading a newspaper alone in a sandwich joint and feeling nausea because she’s now married to a dentist with an I.Q. of 95; racetracks, parks, park picnics; even jails; her dull friends; your dull friends; your drinking, her dancing; your flirting, her flirting; her pills, your fucking on the side and her doing the same; sleeping together”
― Charles Bukowski, Women

“so it's always a process of letting go, one way or another”
― Charles Bukowski, The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems, 1946-1966

“and getting dressed we talk about what else there might be to do, but being together solves most of it, in fact, solves all of it”
― Charles Bukowski, Mockingbird Wish Me Luck

“sometimes I hate you,"
she said.”
― Charles Bukowski, Love Is a Dog from Hell

“I wasn't much of a petty thief. I wanted the whole world or nothing.”
― Charles Bukowski, Post Office

“Genius might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way.”
― Charles Bukowski

“That's what friendship is, sharing the prejudice of experience.”
― Charles Bukowski

“I'm going to open another vottle. not a vottle, but a bottle. you open it and I'll drink it. and you try to write as much as I did without falling off of your chair.”
― Charles Bukowski

“YOU DULL ME!”
― Bukowski C.

“Buy the ticket, take the ride.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

“The basis of action is lack of imagination. It is the last resource of those who know not how to dream.”
― Oscar Wilde

“In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane.”
― Oscar Wilde