Charles Bukowski Quotes

Reading was my escape growing up in Ohio. Both of my parents lost their jobs when I was a teen, and it was hard. But I always had my books. Reading gave me a way of living different lives.

And woven into the fabric of this harsh existence was music.

Books are a guide in youth, and an entertainment for age. They support us under solitude, and keep us from being a burden to ourselves. They help us to forget the crossness of men and things, compose our cares and our passions, and lay our disappointments asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride or design in their conversation.

Books—they weren't ladders out of the abyss, but they were companions.

Books afford the surest relief in the most melancholy moments.

No matter how people mess with you or let you down, or how you let yourself down, a good book means that when you get in bed that night, you have a good hour. I feel like you pay all day for that hour. That's what books mean to me. I can open this two-dimensional , flat white page with squiggly little black marks on them, and someone has created this world that you're going to enter into.

Mother used to say escape is never further than the nearest book. Well, Mumsy, no, not really. Your beloved large-print sagas of rags, riches, and heartbreak were no camouflage against the miseries trained on you by the tennis ball launcher of life, were they? But, yes, Mum, there again, you have a point. Books don’t offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.

It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.

In the total darkness, poetry is still there, and it is there for you.

Humanity needs dreams to be able to survive the miseries of daily existence, even if only for an instant.

Books were my window on the world. Growing up at the Elephant and Castle, which was very rough, my paradise was the library.

Books are like my one and only joy.

As a kid, books were my great escape and my salvation.

For solace, I love a book that opens up my perspective.

I have many reasons why I think reading is really important. It provided for me a refuge, especially during difficult times. It provided me with the notion that I could find an ending that was different from what was happening to me at the time.

Ordinary people don't know how much books can mean to someone who's cooped up.

I entrench myself in my books equally against sorrow and the weather.

From that time on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends. Books became her friends and there was one for every mood.

Half the time I pick up a book, that's what I'm trying to get.

Reading gave me hope.

What I would most like to think they would take away, is what I take away when I read my favorite books. Which is the knowledge that there is always somewhere you can go, that you love, and where you're safe. And that's how I feel about my favorite books, wherever I am, if I've got that book with me, I've got a place where I can go and be happy. So if that place is Hogwarts for anyone, then I couldn't be more honored or humbled.

This girl shivers and crawls under the covers with all her clothes on and falls into an overdue library book, a faerie story with rats and marrow and burning curses. The sentences build a fence around her, a Times Roman 10-point barricade, to keep the thorny voices in her head from getting too close.

Each book was a world unto itself, and in it I took refuge.

And sometimes then he sat with us for an hour or so, sharing our limbo, listening while I read. Books from any shelf, opened at any page, in which I would start and finish anywhere, mid-sentence sometimes. Wuthering Heights ran into Emma, which gave way to The Eustace Diamonds, which faded into Hard Times, which ceded to The Woman in White. Fragments. It didn't matter. Art, its completeness, its formedness, its finishedness, had no power to console. Words, on the other hand, were a lifeline.

I think books were my salvation, they saved me from being miserable.