Charles Bukowski Quotes

How vast a memory has Love!

I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.

A kiss is often about the future and the past. A lost dream, about the discretion of the idealism.

Love is so much more deadly than I had thought, love is so much inherent as the very lack, and we are guaranteed by a need to be renewed continuously. Love is now, is forever. There is just the blow of grace - call it passion.

Love, however, is very materially assisted by a warm and active imagination: which has a long memory, and will thrive, for a considerable time, on very slight and sparing food.

Let us drink together, fellows, as we did in days of yore. And still enjoy the golden hours that Fortune has in store; The absent friends remembered be, in all that’s sung or said, And Love immortal consecrate the memory of the dead.

true love is felonious… You take someone’s breath away… You rob them of the ability to utter a single word… You steal a heart.

Yes, it's crazy. Love is either crazy or it's nothing at all.

Because who can describe that look that triggers the memory of loved ones? Who can anticipate the frown, the smile, or the misplaced lock of hair that sends a swift, undeniable signal from the past? Who can ever estimate the power of association, which is always strongest in moments of love and in memories of death?

Lover," she whispers, and closes her eyes. It falls upon her. Love is like dying.

Love must be as much a light as it is a flame.

Without warning as a whirlwind swoops on an oak Love shakes my heart

We must never expect discretion in first love: it is accompanied by such excessive joy that unless the joy is allowed to overflow, it will choke you.

Love is a clash of lightnings

Your lips and mine, two sips of wine, memories are made of this.

Love, the simplest, strongest, and most unforgiving of all emotions.

For better or for worse, music is the language of memory. It is also the language of love.

Love is like a friendship caught on fire.

Love is a wave building to a crescendo. Ride if you will, ride it with me.

[Memory] is a passion no less powerful or pervasive than love. It is [the ability] to live in more than one world, to prevent the past from fading, and to call upon the future to illuminate it.

What a strange world it is where you can have as much sex as you like but love is taboo. I'm talking about the real thing, the grand passion, which may not allow affection or convenience or happiness. The truth is that love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down. That's the size of it, the immensity of it. It's not proper, it's not clean, it's not containable.

Nowadays he doesn't think of his wife, though he knows he can turn around and evoke every move of her, describe any aspect of her, the weigh of her wrist on his heart during the night.

True love gallops, it flies, it is the swiftest of all modes of thought, swifter even than hate and fear.

Poets often describe love as an emotion that we can't control, one that overwhelms logic and common sense. That's what it was like for me. I didn't plan on falling in love with you, and I doubt if you planned on falling in love with me. But once we met, it was clear that neither of us could control what was happening to us. We fell in love, despite our differences, and once we did, something rare and beautiful was created. For me, love like that has happened only once, and that's why every minute we spent together has been seared in my memory. I'll never forget a single moment of it.

... if one can remember without loving, then couldn't one love without remembering?