Many people are good to me. Many hate me. But there are some out there who know that I’m truly some kind of simple soul caught in a wild gamble. They know me. They know that I sit between these walls. They know I’ve been burned. And that I still laugh.
// Charles Bukowski, from a letter to Louise Webb
…I’ve never felt good with the crowd. I never belonged, I still do not belong, but the worst part is I do not even belong with the best ones, the living ones. I seem sliced off forever by some god damn trick, either my imagining or some type of insanity, but even the good ones leave me dangling and I feel like a fool, and I know that I am a fool for I feel what I know…
Screams From The Balcony // Charles Bukowski
We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well
that Death will tremble to take us.
// Charles Bukowski
Lighting new cigarettes,
pouring more
drinks.
It has been a beautiful
fight.
Still
is.
// Charles Bukowski
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
My heart is a thousand years old. I am not like other people.
// Charles Bukowski
The problem was you had to keep choosing between between one evil and 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 goddamn nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidate who reminded them most of themselves.
I had no interest in anything. I had no idea how I was going to escape.
Ham on Rye // Charles Bukowski
I want to be with you,
It is as simple
And as complicated as that.
// Charles Bukowski
I’ve had so many knives stuck into me, when they hand me a flower I can’t quite make out what it is. It takes time.
// 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
