Charles Bukowski Quotes

Am I awake or dreaming? It doesn’t matter anymore. When I close my eyes I dream of death and war. When I open my eyes I see death and war.

We are living even now among punishments and ruins.

Death and worse happened on the plains.

Nothing could have survived our life.

To such men the desperate and horrible thought has come that perhaps the whole of human life is but a bad joke, a violent and ill-fated abortion of the primal mother, a savage and dismal catastophe of nature.

So many humans. So many colours. They keep triggering inside me. They harass my memory. I see them tall in their heaps, all mounted on top of each other. There is air like plastic, a horizon like setting glue. There are skies manufactured by people, punctured and leaking, and there are soft, coal-coloured clouds, beating, like black hearts. And then. There is death. Making his way through all of it. On the surface: unflappable, unwavering. Below: unnerved, untied, and undone.

What destruction have I been blessed by?

the same question arose in every soul: "For what, for whom, must I kill and be killed?"... p982

War was the ultimate chaos, a pounding, soul-destroying snarl, ending in blown-apart men lying unburied on the cold earth. There was nothing more cosmically chaotic than war.

I'm a fountain of blood in the shape of a girl . . . leave me now return tonight tide will show you the way if you forget my name you will go astray like a killer whale trapped in a bay

War is like a monster," he says, almost to himself. "War is the devil. It starts and it consumes and it grows and grows and grows." He's looking at me now. "And otherwise normal men become monsters, too.

Each step is more difficult than the last; the heaviness fills me and turns my limbs to stone. You must hurt or be hurt.

The world is full enough of hurts and mischances without wars to multiply them.

Sometimes survival is the worst alternative there is

I've been beaten, I've been bruised, I was left for dead as well.

As I view it, spending over two years in a cage is far worse than having your face pounded and dealing with a black eye for a week or two.

It's easier to bleed than sweat, Mr. Motes.

...as if someone had thrown a hand grenade into the middle of a teddy bear orgy and the only survivors had had their fur blown off.

They were glued down, every last one of them. A packet of souls. Was it fate?Misfortune?Is that what glued them down like that?Of course not.Let's not be stupid.It probably had more to do with the hurled bombs, thrown down by humans hiding in the clouds.

Peace is only better than war when it's not hell too. War being hell makes sense.

The storm lashes us, out of the confusion of grey and yellow the hail of splinters whips forth the childlike cries of the wounded, and in the night shattered life groans painfully into silence. Our hands are earth, our bodies clay and our eyes pools of rain. We do not know whether we are still alive.

There are evils worse than death.

I am filled with fear and tormented with terrible visions of pain. Everywhere people are hurting one another, the planet is rampant with injustices, whole societies plunder groups of their own people, mothers imprison sons, children perish while brothers war. O, woe.

I found that life has to be edited to continue.

If hurts were hairs, we'd all look like grizzlies.