Charles Bukowski Quotes

It is a blessing as well as a burden to love so much that you can hurt so badly when love is gone.

They’d already taken her from me once. I didn’t want to lose her again.

I love you too much to say goodbye.

I maintain that all sorrow comes from love of those things of which loss deprives me.

I've never forgotten him. Dare I say I miss him? I do. I miss him. I still see him in my dreams. They are nightmares mostly, but nightmares tinged with love. Such is the strangeness of the human heart. I still cannot understand how he could abandon me so unceremoniously, without any sort of goodbye, without looking back even once. The pain is like an axe that chops my heart.

Never having been in love, this is going to be a real trick. I think of my parents. The way my father never failed to bring her gifts from the woods. The way my mother's face would light up at the sound of his boots at the door. The way she almost stopped living when he died.

It is better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all.

Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love.

July 13, 1954 was the most tragic day of my life. I had lost my beloved Frida forever. To late now I realized that the most wonderful part of my life had been my love for Frida.

Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Finding another person to love is finding another person to lose.

He was a super shiny boy and I liked the shape of him. Under the blanket. In the shower. I liked his shadow on the street and his imprint on the sofa. I hated the smell of hair gel on his head, but I loved it on the pillow. I love the smell of losing someone.

[S]he believed that the Buddhists were right–that if you want, you will suffer; if you love, you will grieve. (68)

McKenna will always be a part of me, no matter where he goes. They say that people who've lost a limb sometimes feel as if they still have it. How many times I've felt that McKenna was still here, and the empty space beside me was alive with his presence." She closed her eyes and leaned forward until her forehead and the tip of her nose touched the cool glass. "I love him beyond reason," she whispered. "He's a stranger to me now, and yet he is still so familiar. I can't imagine a sweeter agony, having him so close.

I don't hate you, I love you, you're part of myself, you're my heart and when you go it's my heart torn out and carried away--

Don't go," she whispered, her eyes closed. It was all happening too fast. She couldn't give Daniel up. Not yet. She didn't think she ever could.

Despair is part of love.

TODD!" I yell again and I reach him and his Noise opens even farther and wraps around me like a blanket and I'm grabbing him to me, grabbing him to me like I'll never let him go and he calls out in pain but his other arm is grabbing me back - "I thought you were dead," he's saying, his breath on my neck. "I thought you were dead." "Todd," I say and I'm crying and the only thing I can say is his name. "Todd.

I still love you. And sometimes, my friend, the love that I have, and can't give to you, crushes the breath from my chest. Sometimes, even now, my heart is drowning in a sorrow that has no stars without you, and no laughter, and no sleep.

There is no use in loving things if you have to be torn from them, is there? And it's so hard to keep from loving things, isn't it?

What else is there to write about than love and loss?

I'm dying with you before I'm living without you.

The truth is simple, you do not die from love. You only wish you did.

Why is the measure of love loss?

I hate you for all the years I 'll have to live without you. How can a heart hurt this much and still go on beating? How can I feel this bad without dying from it? I 've bruised my knees with praying to have you back. None of my prayers have been answered. I tried to send them up to heaven but they 're trapped here on earth, like bobwhites beneath the snow. I try to sleep and it's like I 'm suffocating. Where have you gone? Once you said that if I wasn't with you, it wouldn't be heaven. I can't let go of you. Come back and haunt me. Come back.